Mike DiGirolamo: African forest elephants are a unique and distinct species serving as the primary or only dispersers of certain seeds in the Congo rainforest. They are sometimes referred to as gardeners of the forest. Scientists formerly classified them as a subspecies of African elephant, but genetic evidence would later emerge indicating a distinct species. But there is still more we don’t know, like the full extent of their ecological value, if such a thing can even be quantified. In the discussion you’re about to hear, I speak with two scientists about the value of African forest elephants, how they play a vital role in shaping their environment, the Congo rainforest, and the giant carbon sequestering trees it’s known for. We also discuss what scientists still don’t know about them, and why they say urgent protection and study is needed.

Andrew Davies: If you think of your garden, if you would lose the gardener, you would lose the shape and the structure of that garden, which would then have many ramifications for many other species.

Fiona “Boo” Maisels: They’re the functional glue that makes everything click together in the system that exists today.

Mike: This is Mongabay Explores, a podcast series about our world’s unique places, species and the people working to save them. You’re listening to the sixth and final episode of our fourth season mongabay explores the Congo Basin. The value of a forest elephant is hard to quantify. Even with a seemingly simple metric like money. It’s tough to put a dollar amount or a specific value on something that has intrinsic and wide-reaching ecological benefits — Andrew Davies, Assistant Professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University and Fiona ‘Boo’ Maisels, a conservation scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society WCS, — tell me what some of those ecological benefits are, why they are so crucial for forest health, and what would happen if we lost forest elephants. Andrew begins by explaining the distinction between the African savanna elephant, also known as the African bush elephant, and the African forest elephant, which genetic evidence began to emerge showing they’re a distinct species around the year 2000. It wasn’t until 2021 that the IUCN classified the forest elephant as a separate and critically endangered species as a result of expert consensus. Separately, they listed the African savanna elephant as endangered.

Andrew: My name is Andrew Davies. I’m an assistant professor at Harvard University. They have quite recently been split into a separate species, they used to be the same species, there was one species of African elephant or not to this savanna elephants or Bush elephants, which are the more common ones, the more numerous ones. And then forest elephants, which is a different species as of a few years ago, forest elephants differ from Bush elephants or Savanna elephants. In fact, they’re a bit smaller. The tusks are different shape. They have they’re very different habits. They live in tropical forests versus open savannas. They also do different things. So Savanna elephants, you know, they topple trees, and they’re very well known for that. But when and in fact, some of the work that that we’ve done before and Savanna elephants have shown how to actually decrease carbon storage at local scales, where as far as elephants don’t do that they don’t really knock over trees, they’re more pull out the saplings. And part of the reason is because you know, tropical rainforest tree species are so much bigger, they can’t push them over. But part of it’s also this just a different habitat. And importantly, a big difference between savanna and forest elephants is the endangered status. So although savanna elephants are endangered, forest elephants are critically endangered, so there are far fewer of them. And they have a smaller distribution.

Mike: The International Monetary Fund estimates as of 2021 that the ecological services a single forest elephant provides is $1.75 million. While value estimates like this can inform conservation policy decisions, it’s a contentious way of doing so and also not a particularly comprehensive one my guests say. I asked Andrew to explain the value of forest elephants in finer detail and also whether or not he thinks that they can even be quantified.

Andrew: I think the last part of your question has a lot of weight, whether they can be quantified, nd I think that that plays a big role in trying to value any species of biodiversity, if there’s a lot of things that we can put on species and biodiversity and numbers we can try. But the end of the day, they hold a lot of intrinsic value. That is not quantifiable. So I think it’s good to remember that. But I think with forest elephants the value that they play is partly in how their shape forests, there’s a lot of hypotheses around the fact that they increase the amount of carbon that’s stored in in Congo Basin first. They do that by selectively foraging on different saplings, young trees that are of a certain height. By pulling these out of the ground, they basically reduce competition for other individual trees, which can then grow a lot taller and bigger. And these trees are generally ones of very high wood density that hold more carbon than other species to and as a result, the Congo Basin has the biggest trees of any tropical forest and among the highest rates of of above ground carbon storage, and a lot of that has to do elephants it seems, so forest elephants play an extremely important role in increasing carbon storage within the Congo. And they also do a lot of other things for other species and other parts of biodiversity. They disperse nutrients, they disperse seeds. Some of the seeds of the trees that they disperse are these carbon rich, big species. These what we call ‘megafauna dispersed’ tree species. And so they really are the gardeners of the forest in many ways, and their gardening activity leads to increased carbon nutrient distributions, and seed dispersal.

Mike: Fiona Maisels explains in detail why elephants are key seed dispersers. She says that some seeds are spread only by elephants, and some are spread only by elephants and apes. So why is that? Exactly?

Fiona: My real name is Fiona Maisels. Everybody calls me Boo. I’m a conservation scientist. I am employed by the Wildlife Conservation Society. And I’m also an affiliate of the University of Stirling in Scotland. The kinds of seeds that are dispersed only by elephants either are so big, the fruit is so large that nothing else can get into it. Or the seeds themselves are so large that no other animal can swallow them. But a really good example is this one tree, their seeds are about the size of a small football. And they’re stuck on to the trunk of the tree. And the way the elephants get those fruits off of the tree is they’ll bang the tree with their heads, and the fruits eventually fall off. And no other animal can get into them. Because the shell of them is too hard. The seeds are actually very tiny on the inside, but the elephants will pierce them with their tusk. Or if the fruit is small enough they can put it into their mouth and they can crush it. So if there’s no more elephants, those trees will no longer germinate. Another tree has fruits that are a bit smaller, but they’re entirely fibrous and completely distasteful to any other animal. So it’s that kind of thing, which is only dispersed by elephants. Other things that are dispersed by both elephants and apes, they tend to be more fleshy, because gorillas chimpanzees, bonobos, and so on, they, they like to have more sugar and more, right, you know, less less fibrous fruits. But very often the seeds are too big for any other animal to swallow. Because the point of you know, a monkey can eat a fruit on a tree, but unless it carries the seed away from the tree at some distance, it doesn’t really make any difference to the tree because the seeds will probably not germinate underneath the parent. They have to be carried away out of the shade of that tree out of possible…the tree may be producing chemicals that stop its own seeds from germinating underneath it. It wants its own seeds to travel a long way. And elephants in particular, they can go many kilometers. They can eat something and then it’s only 24 hours later that the dung comes out the other end with all the seeds that they’ve transported. So they can take something you know, 5, 6, 7 kilometers away from a tree. The apes, maybe 5, maybe 4? But it’s it’s a subset of seeds that are transported by apes, than are transported by apes plus elephants.

Mike: In communication with me Fiona described the way that the forest is constructed happens in a chicken and egg situation.

Fiona: So elephants and the forest have been around for 10s of thousands of years, at least, forest elephants in Central Africa. So the elephants go from tree to tree, which are their fruiting trees. And to do that, they go in a kind of a straight line, and they form these boulevards through the forest. And as they go down these paths they produce dung that are filled with the seeds of what they’ve eaten. Maybe 24 hours before. And those seeds are distributed along those elephant paths. So if you look at the areas between the paths, and you look for trees that are distributed by elephants, you don’t find very many, they tend to be along the sides of the tree of the paths that they will cut down. So they’re creating their own corridors of their own food, which are basically, if you imagine, it’s like a ‘join the dots’, each dot is a tree. And then you’ve got lines between those trees. And those are all elephant paths. And those lines are all trees that are distributed by elephants. So they’re kind of gardening their own forests.

Mike: The IUCN says that African forest elephants declined in population by 86%, in 31 years, in just one decade between 2002 and 2011, their population declined by 62% — a notably steep drop in a very short amount of time. The ivory trade and habitat loss are cited as drivers of this decline. A grim but important question is, how long does the species have left?

Andrew: Yeah, it is a it is a grim question. I mean, I try to be optimistic, not pessimistic about conservation. And, you know, I don’t necessarily think it’s how much time they have as a species, I think, you know, there are pockets that will have them for a long time. And there are some promising signs. For example, in Gabon recently, it was found that we’ve undercounted them for a long time, and there’s probably more forest elephants in Gabon than we thought. But your points are correct. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the populations are declining, they’re losing their habitat. And part of this is because of deforestation. Part of its also because of oil reserves in the Congo. Some of it may be because of cobalt mining, which people don’t often talk about. And you know, we’re talking a lot about electric cars, and they need cobalt, but a lot of their cobalt comes from the Congo. And it’s a it’s a part of the of those industries we don’t talk about very much. So how much time have left? It depends where you are, you know, in areas in the Congo, in the DRC, probably not very long at all. In fact, these areas are losing elephants, even now we speak but in other areas, like Gabon, or protected areas and Republic of Congo, where we work, the numbers are stable, possibly increasing. So it depends where we are. But I think there’s also been this movement, to your first question is what are they what are they worth about trying to value them and trying to preserve them and give value to the existence to motivate the benefits to carbon into the planet, and is that as an alternative way of getting revenue from these Congo forests.

Mike: Like Andrew, Fiona is also aware of the efforts to put a monetary value on forest elephants, but agrees the attempt at using a specific metric is complicated, and may fail to account for some important contributions, including the composition of the Congo rainforest itself. Over time, she says, in the absence of forest elephants, this would definitely change.

Fiona: Depends what metric you’re going to use for value. There are people who have put monetary value on elephants, in terms of tourism in East Africa, I don’t have those those figures to hand, but in terms of how they are making the forest function. It’s also very hard because if there are no elephants, if they all suddenly blip out of existence, and there’s large areas of Central Africa that are elephant free, then the structure of this forest and the composition of the forest will change. It will take hundreds of years because these individual trees, their lifespan is hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of years. But eventually the endpoint of that is that the type of forest will be mostly composed of trees that the seeds are dispersed by the wind or by birds. Or if there are still any monkeys left, the monkeys can disperse the small seeded fruits. It’ll become much more like a European or Northern boreal forest where most of the seeds just fall down or they’re distributed by the wind. It won’t be the kind of forest that we are used to seeing in the tropical forests of the world.

Mike: Andrew agrees the forest density and structure of the Congo would change and therefore, so would the forest’s ability to sequester carbon.

Andrew: Yes, a lot of it’s modeled or hypothesized — we actually don’t know all that much about forest elephants in comparison to their Savanna cousins or or other species — ut what we suspect will happen is, firstly, carbon stocks would likely decrease because numbers of trees are increased, but the size of trees would likely decrease, there wouldn’t be this, this bias towards these trees with high wood densities so carbon would decrease on an area basis, which over space would mean a reduction in carbon. Another thing big another big thing that these elephants do is maintain these clearings in the Congo Basin, which are locally known as ‘bais.’ And these bais are these really big, open clearings of a kilometer across, two kilometers across, really big clearings that their origins are unknown. They seem to be nutrient rich, sodium rich patches within the forest, but one strong hypothesis is that they are maintained, at least, by elephants, and stay open because of elephants. So we think that because forest elephants frequent them a lot, they visit them partly for the nutrients, sodium in the soil and the water, partly as social arenas, and where forest elephants have been extirpated in parts of the Congo, we seem to notice that these bais are closing, and becoming encroached by the forest. And so if we were to lose forest elephants entirely, not only will carbon decrease across the basin, but these bais would most likely close and that’s one of the one of the projects that we’re doing is to understand whether these elephants actually keep these bais open. And if the bais did close, the ramifications for the Congo would be really far reaching in terms of a lot of other species. Species like forest buffalo use them a lot. Spotted hyenas do, bongos, a whole lot of species rely on these bais. And if we lose them by losing the elephants, all of these other species will suffer as well. And so going back to what I said earlier, that these forest elephants are really the gardeners of the forest, if you think of your garden, if you were to lose the gardener, you would lose the shape and the structure of that garden, which would then have many ramifications for many other species. Those are the quantifiable biodiversity and carbon benefits. If we lose forest elephants, obviously there are magnificent species that have cultural significance to people in the region. And we would lose that which is simply irreplaceable.

Mike: On the topic of bais, the elephant sounds you’re hearing on this podcast, were actually recorded in one, the Dzanga Bai, it’s an elephant enclave of the Central African Republic, a place where 50 to 150 elephants use each and every day. It’s so big, it’s actually visible from space. And on this particular day, I’ve been told there could have been as many as 80 elephants in the background. Mongabay contributor Leonie Joubert reported on the work conducted by Andrew Davies and his colleague, postdoctoral researcher Evan Hawkridge in the CAR and the Republic of Congo, studying how elephants shaped forests and depend upon these bais to survive.

Andrew: Yeah, so we work a lot of the work that I do is in the Odzala-Kokoua National Park, in the Republic of Congo. For listeners who are not familiar, there are two Congos that people often get confused — the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is much larger, and the Republic of Congo, or Congo Brazzaville as it’s sometimes called — and we work in that park in that country. We work there with with our partner organization, African Parks. They have a mandate with the Government of the Republic of the Congo to manage Odzala-Kokoua National Park, for sure it is an incredible place, one of the most wild remote places you could ever go. And the elephant numbers were heavily reduced during the 1990s due to poaching, and through better enforcement and all sorts of different things, the numbers have begun to increase in the park, and different parts of the park still have these historical signatures of poaching. We can see that in the forest, and part of the work we’re doing is trying to unravel what the effects of these declines were, how these elephant populations are increasing, how they reclaiming parts of the forest that they were absent from for decades, so that’s where we do a lot of our work. We’re working on the role that elephants play in shaping the forest and driving nutrients, carbon, other species, those kinds of things.

Mike: Fiona goes into a bit more detail on the importance of these bais, particularly for the social lives of elephants. While elephants communicate with each other with low frequency ‘infra sound,’ they need these clearings to see each other she says — this social gathering process in the communication that comes from it, she describes as extraordinary.

Fiona: We actually did some work on this about 20 years ago, whereby we had a set of about 20 bais, scattered throughout Central African Republic and Congo. And every few months, there would be aerial photographs taken of them. And it was a monitoring program to see if there was a lot of poaching going on. Because when there are no elephants, the vegetation at the sides of the bais, they just grow in and eventually, they’ll just our form a kind of bushy surface, and it will make it probably less easy for the other animals to come in and, and use them. The other animals that do come in and use them — just to reiterate that these bais are kept open by elephants, I think nothing else is physically powerful enough to keep these bais open — the other animals that use them, there’s gorillas, plus forest buffalo, sitatunga, which is kind of aquatic antelope, they’ll come in and they’ll eat the sedges and the grasses, and the highly digestible sort of super abundance of vegetation within the bais. And then if it all gets filled up with bushes, then the quantity of food will be reduced. And that will no longer be available in such quantities to those other herbivores. The second thing that may happen is that the bais, because they’re open, and everybody can see each other, it’s used as social arenas, for elephants and gorillas, specifically, so groups of gorillas will come in, and they can all see each other. And when you’re in the forest, and you’re a gorilla, you don’t see the others very clearly. And you can’t get very close to them, because there’ll be a conflict. But if you can see them from a distance, it probably gives a chance for females to size up other males and think ‘maybe if I transfer to the other group, it might be better for me as an individual.’ And certainly, there’s a researcher on elephants called Andrea Takala, who did 30 years of work on elephants in such a clearing in Central African Republic. And she knew something like 4000 individual elephants by their facial characteristics. And, you know, those elephants know each other. And she would be able to predict — she knew who was related to who, because she’d been watching them and watching who gives birth, and so on and so on through all these years. And she was able to say, ‘okay, that elephant over there coming into the clearing, hundreds of meters away from this elephant, she’s related, and they will, when that elephant comes into the clearing, they will go up to each other.’ And they’ll do an elephant greeting, which is sort of twisting the trunks together. Because they’re family, whereas in the forest, you can’t see anybody else. Elephants communicate with, you know, sounds that we can’t hear, infrasound, and you know, they probably are communicating all the time. But when they’re in the clearing, you can see this happening. It’s quite extraordinary. And so both gorillas and elephants require these clearings for some kind of social interactions. And the other animals use it just for food. And some animals of course, use it for minerals. You see animals like bongos digging holes and eating the soil.

Mike: One thing that surprised Andrew, he says, is that not all bais are the same, or rather, they aren’t the same to all species. Meaning you can’t just protect one bai and offset the degradation of another, disrupting one bai could be disrupting an entirely unique community.

Andrew: Something that surprised us, this may seem relatively small, but I don’t really think it is, is that when we go back to these bais, these clearings that I was telling you about, that these elephants we think maintain, you know, they all kind of look the same. And they seem to function the same way. But we’ve we’ve found that they’re actually very different. And different bais have different plants, different communities of plants, different mammalian species that frequent them, and they’re not all the same. They’re not all attractive to elephants, some of them have large visitations by western lowland gorillas, others are frequented by elephants. And the fact that they’re not all the same, that they vary, their biodiversity is different, I think is surprising — we thought they’d all be the same. It may seem like a footnote to a bigger story, but I think if you unpack it a bit, it’s really showing the biodiversity value. And what’s really interesting is how the biodiversity changes over very small spatial scales. And so we can’t just, you know, sacrifice one part of the forest, thinking we’re conserving another part, it’s extremely different, and the difference between these clearings and these bais is really phenomenal, which raises a lot of questions, like how did they originate? Are elephants maintaining all of them, or is it a relationship between elephants and gorillas that do these things?

Mike: Forest elephant health is also impacted by climate change. Fiona references a study in which researchers attributed thinner or skinnier elephants to a lack of food as a result of climate change. Trees that produce the food they eat requires certain nighttime temps in order to produce a flower. If temperatures stay above that threshold, then it’s a problem.

Fiona: Okay, so this comes from a very nice multidisciplinary paper that was written in 2020. It was at a site in central Gabon, a research site that had been set up in 1983. And the researchers had been following the trees that were eaten by elephants and great apes and monkeys. Since then, you know, and every two weeks, people go out, they quantify the amount of leaves and fruit and flowers that each individual tree has. And they think they have several thousand trees that they follow, and have followed over the years. And they noticed that the quantity of fruit available on the trees was going down over a 30 year period. At the same time, they had been taking weather records, so they’ve got temperature and humidity and rainfall. So they know that there’s been a change in temperature as there has been everywhere else in the world. And from the point of view of the trees, a lot of the trees in these forests, they require a minimum temperature at night, at some point during the year, in order for the trees to have a flower. So if the minimum temperature doesn’t get below, for example, 14 degrees centigrade, no flowers, no fruit, for those species. And this has been happening more and more and more and more over the years. So that’s the mechanism why the trees are producing fruit. And at the same time, since about 2012, something like that, they’ve been taking photographs of elephants. And you can see just by looking at an elephant, the body conditions, so they they set up a scoring system from basically very thin and skeletal to well fed. And over that time, more and more elephants are getting thinner and thinner and thinner. And they attributed this to the lack of fruit, elephants of hugely frugivorous in the rainforest. So if it’s happening in this one site in Gabbar, it’s probably happening all over the world, in at least tropical rainforests. So who knows, you know, more work needs to be done on orangutans or spider monkeys or any of these frugivorious animals that live across the forested tropics. And especially the animals that should be looked at are the threatened species, or the species that make the forest function, otherwise the whole system just goes tumbling down, like a tower of cards.

Mike: Earlier I described the steep population decline that forest elephants experienced over the past three decades, a great portion of it occurring between 2002 and 2011. Fiona herself was an author on the study that highlighted this in 2013. She paints a pretty bleak picture of what the consequences of a continued population decline would look like.

Fiona: But you can look at what happens. What’s the end point of this and you go to South America, because South America 15,000 years ago, was covered with loads of large mammals, some of which were quite closely related to elephants. One of them was even called the Columbian elephant. And they performed all of these same services, ecosystem services as modern elephants do in Africa and Asia today. And what of the tree species in South America are used by people for food so people have taken over the seed dispersal. So avocados are a really good example. Avocados are a South American genus, quite a lot of species. Everybody knows they have large seeds. They were transported by elephants, or elephant-like animals, they were called gomphotheres, and those animals have now all gone because of us. There’s pretty good evidence that the simultaneous arrival of people and the disappearance of these large animals — it wasn’t just chance, it was probably people just slowly killing more and more and more of these large animals until there’s none left. But people disperse these seeds now, so this species of tree are still there because they’re useful to people. But what has happened is that the lateral transport of nutrients that those large animals use to perform no longer happens. So the the nutrients are, for example, take phosphorus, phosphorus is eroded very slowly off the Andes. And it comes down off the slopes of the Andes into the Amazon River. And it goes down the Amazon River and out to sea. And it’s a really important nutrient for plant vigor. When all these big animals were still there, they would be feeding on the plants that grew at the base of the Andes, and along the Amazon River, and they would be going, they would be walking laterally, north and south from the Amazon and carrying the nutrients out. So that a much wider area of forest received those nutrients — that no longer happens. And there’s work that’s been done by some people at the University of Oxford and the University of Arizona, that suggests about 30% or 35% of those nutrient carrying capabilities are no longer there. And so the soils are getting poorer and poorer and poorer in the Amazon. That would happen in Africa, if the large animals were eliminated, especially the huge bodied animals that go a long distance.

Mike: While Fiona describes impacts that would occur if we did lose forest elephants, there are still more impacts that could happen that we don’t know. And this problem isn’t unique to just forest elephants, but many species of flora and fauna in the Congo Basin.

Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question. Like there’s so many things that are just basic, fundamentally, you know, natural history about these species, like, it’s hard to put your head around, because it’s so vast, but you know, almost anything we [study] in Congo is new information. You know, it’s everything is novel, everything is new, because we didn’t know it before. It’s hard to know, what secrets remain to be uncovered when we just don’t even know what they are. If that’s if that if you know what I mean. One of the big interesting things about Congo in general compared to other tropical forest regions, like the Amazon or Southeast Asia, is that it still has its intact megafaunal  community. And by that, I mean forest elephants, forest buffalo, things like that, the Amazon used to have large species that were mostly hunted out during the Pleistocene, Southeast Asia has remnants of Asian elephants, and Sumatran rhinos and tigers and things. And so I think really, getting back to your question, it’s one of the things we need to understand is, what is the value of these megafaunal species? And how do they shape Congo in a way that is different to Amazonia? Or Southeast Asia, which are far more studied? But what are we missing from those ecosystems that we can see in Congo, trying to understand what happens if we lose forest elephants? And these kinds of questions, you really don’t know, they’re just hypotheses at the moment, we can speculate, but we don’t know. And so just uncovering those things would be really valuable from that perspective, but then also, there’s questions about Congo more broadly, the extent of the peatlands that have been discovered quite recently in the DRC. How big are they? How old are they? How vulnerable are they? Things like this would be, you know, we just don’t have the information. How old is the Congo? How is the boundary between forest and savanna shifting over time? Many, many questions. The DRC Government is trying to make money out of these forests, as is their right to do, as their resource. But if there’s an alternative, you know, that would make these forests valuable, to keep them as they are, to keep forest elephants, those kinds of things would be valuable. And it’s a tough situation. I mean, Congo is a poor region, and it needs development, and people need employment. And you can’t sit back and tell the government not to develop its forests, obviously, there are issues around intent and corruption and things like that. But on the surface, we can’t sit in the west and say, ‘Well, you can’t develop this’ without giving any alternatives, because of the benefits we derive from those forests. And so I think as, as a global community, we need to rally and think, you know, what are these forests worth to us? And how can we incentivize their conservation?

Mike: That question Andrew just mentioned is one we examined in detail on the previous episode of this podcast series, which I encourage you to listen to. But Andrew offered a summary that explains the key problem we highlighted in that episode, and also throughout this entire series.

Andrew: I mean, one thing is just investment into the conservation, recognition of the value, there’s some work that’s been done, that’s been trying to put a number on that. I have reservations about putting numbers and values on species because it just doesn’t capture so much of what’s intrinsically valuable about them, as I’ve said, but purely investment. You know, the Congo Basin has far lower levels of investment in every form, really, than the Amazon or Southeast Asia in terms of conservation, scientific research, education levels in so many ways, and first is just to put more money into understanding what they do and into conserving them.

Mike: Over the course of this podcast season, we’ve touched upon many issues impacting the Congo Basin, there’s a lot to unpack. I hope this series has provided some help in doing that. While we’ve covered a lot of ground from financing forest protection, the human rights and environmental impacts of cobalt mining, and the ethical questions about protected areas and many other factors impacting this region, there is still so much more to cover. A question I’ve been asking a lot of sources throughout the season is what they wish more people knew about the Congo Basin. This is what Fiona said.

Fiona: I wish they knew that their forests are being emptied of wildlife. So you get something called an empty forest, if you fly over it, it looks intact [but] if you walk around under it, in some places, there’s not even any monkeys left.

Mike: I’d like to thank Fiona and Andrew for speaking with me on this episode of Mongabay Explores, this was episode six and the last episode in this season. I’m your host, Mike DiGirolamo, editorial support for this episode was provided by Terna Gyuse and Erik Hoffner. The script was written by myself. The soundscape and elephant recordings heard in the intro and outro were recorded in the Dzanga Bai forest clearing in the Central African Republic. Credit goes to the Elephant Listening Project at the K Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.