When the Royals left the parks' protected confines, all that changed. During one rainy season, they wandered into an area heavily grazed by cattle. Grass was abundant, but the cattle had trimmed it too short for the elephants to consume, and the giant plant-eaters were forced to eat the leaves of woody plants instead. The findings were published recently in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Cerling stressed that it's too soon to say whether such shifts in diet will affect elephants' ability to reproduce. But humans are pushing their cattle further and further into elephant habitat every year in part of a worrying trend that could combine with altered rainfall patterns from climate change to place huge amounts of stress on the the already troubled animals. "Elephants are very adaptable, but as we continue to degrade their habitat, they're going to run out of that ability to adapt," Darryl de Ruiter of Texas A&M University said. "They have to keep eating on a near-constant basis. If they're constrained within a smaller and smaller area, they're going to become more destructive to that environment." Related Links: |
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