Lost Science is an ongoing series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding after cuts by the Trump administration. The conversations have been edited for clarity and length. Here’s why we’re doing this.
Interview by Emily Anthes
Joshua Plotnick: For about 20 years, I have been studying Asian elephant cognition. The biggest issue for the conservation of Asian elephants is human-elephant conflict. Humans and elephants are fighting to share limited resources, and you’re starting to see conflict that is resulting in the loss of human and elephant life.
For the past seven years, what we have done is systematically identify the individual elephants in the Salakpra Wildlife Sanctuary in Kanchanaburi, Thailand. We’ve identified more than 300 of them and created personality profiles. The idea is: If you can identify an elephant that is raiding a farmer’s crop field, can you direct your mitigation toward that particular elephant’s personality?
We’ve developed this device called a targeted personality device. It can play a strobe light or display different colors. We can play sounds of predators or novel sounds, depending on whether the elephant is more afraid of predators or novel stimuli. It can spray the odor of potential predators. You can program this device based on all the data you’ve collected on the personalities of the elephants that have come into the crop field. We’re just starting to test that.
The majority of funding for this project has come from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They have funded us continuously until the president’s executive order freezing foreign aid in January. U.S. Fish and Wildlife sent a stop-work order. And there’s been no word whatsoever since.
It’s been pretty devastating. We haven’t been able to expand at the exact critical moment when we need to. We’re going to have to go month by month until we can figure out how to support this project long term. We’re not willing to shut it down.
We get asked all the time: Why should the American taxpayer contribute money to the conservation of wildlife abroad? The biodiversity of the planet is everyone’s responsibility because we’re all interconnected. And when you lose an animal like the elephant, you lose an incredible seed disperser who enables the biodiversity of plants, which leads to increased food resources for other wildlife, which leads to increased resources for humans. But you also lose the ability to teach your children about these animals.
What I think people don’t recognize is how incredibly influential the American taxpayer dollar is to conservation. I’ve been proud to be an American for this reason: We have, for so long, been a steward for conservation. And now, practically overnight, that’s been shut off. It’s really almost soul-crushing.
Joshua Plotnick is the director of the Comparative Cognition for Conservation Lab at Hunter College, City University of New York.
Emily Anthes is a science reporter, writing primarily about animal health and science. She also covered the coronavirus pandemic.
The post He Studied Elephant Behavior to Save Lives appeared first on New York Times.
