Robbie (1:58)

These are my grandfathers. Oh, my grandfather.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (2:01)

History. Yeah.

Robbie (2:03)

Yeah. My grandfather arrived in Mozambique in 1951.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (2:08)

Yo, yo. What a story.

Robbie (2:11)

And he lived the heyday of Africa, Sam. Like, literally they would. They would. They would put all their stuff into a uni mog and they would disappear up into Crook's Corner. It was in that area that they would hunt. They would hunt elephants, they would hunt buffalo.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (2:30)

Creating some of that landscape of fear that's now missing up there.

Robbie (2:34)

Exactly, exactly. He loved it, dude. Like. And this is his book. He wrote one book and it's called My Last Kambaku.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (2:45)

I will look for that.

Robbie (2:47)

It's very difficult to find. There was only a thousand printed.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (2:52)

Why? Well, I owe a friend of mine a bloody book that I got that I lost for him. If I can replace it with something like that, he'll be Very happy.

Robbie (3:01)

It's amazing, man. This book has just. It's amazing to see. It's amazing to see. But, yeah, before we got cut off earlier, I did all of my work at Vits to start with, and I did all my work under Kevin Rogers.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (3:17)

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Robbie (3:19)

And the River Savannah's boundaries program back in the day, if you remember that.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (3:23)

That's right. Yeah.

Robbie (3:25)

All the old school guys. Harry Biggs, Angela Gaylord.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (3:31)

I do a lot of stuff with Angela, still with African parks.

Robbie (3:35)

Oh, amazing.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (3:36)

Yeah. No, we do. We're very good mates. Anyway. Yeah, no, Harry is still a bit active, although he's not, of course, not with Sandbox.

Robbie (3:46)

Harry was. I remember being a grad student, just listening to Harry, and Harry was just this, like. I don't know how you describe Harry. He's just full of life, full of energy. Just always had ideas. Everything that you said was an amazing idea. There was not a bad idea out there. Right. It was amazing.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (4:02)

And, you know, he hasn't changed, eh. And he also looks about the same he did when he retired about 10 years ago, so. That's amazing. Yeah, yeah.

Robbie (4:11)

It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. Well, Dr. Sam Ferreira, welcome to the Origins foundation podcast. I know that we have been. It's been a while of us trying to put this on the calendar, and obviously, since we put this on the calendar, you guys have had incredible rainfall, incredible floods.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (4:28)

Now, we had. Yeah, well, it was a very concentrated two weeks, I guess.

Robbie (4:32)

Yeah. How's everything now? Everything. Rivers have dissipated, I assume.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (4:38)

Yeah. You know, a place like Kruger, you know, obviously you've got big river systems. I think what made this one very different is that all the rivers were flooding. Not just normally. When you've got these kind of systems, it's one or two rivers. So that put a lot of constraints on us, but the team has worked very hard. I think only one of our camps are still not functional, the Taba. But the rest of the. Of the rest camps is all. You got to drive a little bit of different roads to get to all of them. Was not all the bridges are corrected and stuff like that, but now it probably reflects on the ability of a big organization to respond. We may not be able to respond as efficiently as what private people would like to do, but it is one of those. Those aspects working in government, I guess. But I think that we are probably very back to. I don't have the statistics, but I think we're back to probably our tourist occupancy, what we normally have.

Robbie (5:40)

Wow. Wow. Obviously, Lataba camp was the one hit the most. Any updates out of Lataba Elephant Museum? Everything okay, There's, I mean the, the water.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (5:51)

What was really interesting with that flat, Robbie, was when you, when we had things like the Oliphange river flood some years back, it would leave this black salt. The Letaba river didn't have any of that. It was sand. In fact, when you really to the huts. Wow. When you get to the huts where the water went up to like a foot or something, you don't even see a mark on the wall, you know, which is typically what you do. So I think that in that way that salt, black salt is all also tend to have probably some chemicals and stuffing. So in some ways it's a little bit more easy to, to clean up. But I think the museum is fine. You know, you know, you got to do the basic cleanup and stuff like that. I actually don't know if that as much water in it or not. But you know, as I said, some very interesting observations. Just out of interest on the sideline, we, we are about to initiate.

Robbie (6:46)

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Dr. Sam Ferreira (8:52)

A renewed crocodile research program. We have had some crocodile work in the, in the Ulifan river, but these big floods has washed away a ton of crocodile basking areas. And some of the work that we've done highlighted really important roles of basking areas and thermoregulation of crocs and then the resistance to diseases and things like that. So, yeah, interesting times.

Robbie (9:22)

Well, I know that we're going to obviously talk about the most controversial topic that there is in Africa right now, which is elephants. But as a side note, I'd love to hear your hypothesis. What do you think crocs and hippos do in these monster floods? Because it's not just like a little trickle, it is raging. Sam.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (9:41)

Well, we have. We happen to have had some crocs before actually with some satellite transmitters on. And I was very interested watching what they did. And they are amazing. They shift. They shift to the edges of the water. You know, as the water rises, they just get out of the big currents. It's incredible.

Robbie (9:59)

Wow.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (10:00)

The same. I saw hippos here. Well, I had a few surprises here just in front of my house. And there are some. I think one of the other things that happens in these big flats when there's water everywhere, the crocs distributed very widely, you know, so you pick up crocs in little bands and stuff. We normally would not expect to see them, you know.

Robbie (10:22)

Interesting. Yeah, very interesting, Interesting, interesting, interesting. But we're going to talk about elephants today. Elephants is the hottest topic. It continues to be the hottest topic out there. It's probably the thing in Africa that everyone talks the most about. And arguably you're one of the voices that you know is right at the top of the pile when it comes to elephants because your job essentially is you're the large mammal ecologist of Kruger national park or sand parks. And your job, it obviously has everything. But elephants take up obviously a Large amount of your time, Sam.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (11:02)

No, it does take up a large amount of my time. And, and you know, maybe I must give you the bit of history how I.

Robbie (11:10)

Absolutely, yeah, please.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (11:14)

You know, there's. There's a lot of people that you've probably been aware, a lot of people that criticize me in terms of I was just a placement by i4 or the student of Rudy Vanarde, which just about every man is in the country hated, etc. But the reality is when the job became available, I actually applied for a coordinator of regional ecologists. And this one on the sideline and Harry Biggs. We were at a elephant discussion group in. You don't mind me telling you about a detail like this?

Robbie (11:51)

No, I love it. I love it.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (11:53)

So Harry Biggs actually came to me at a meeting we were at. Where was it? Near Broncos Prate, and said to me, look, man, he's really sorry I didn't make the shortlist for that for this regional ecologist coordination. I said, okay, I understand.

Robbie (12:08)

I said, did you know that? Did you know that already or is he breaking the news to you?

Dr. Sam Ferreira (12:14)

He was breaking the news to me and I said, look, I understand. He was explaining to me a bit about bee and all that. I said to him, no, no, that's fine. What about the other one? He says, what other one? I said, no, I also applied for the large mammal ecologist or scientist position. He says, no, he hasn't seen that thing. But can I please give him my application? Which I did over lunch. Okay with me. And I was doing some work with University Pretoria at that stage. We were up in Northern Mozambique looking at some elephant, elephant back sizes and eight structures and things like that and collaring some elephants. And I got a message says, no, can I actually flew back with a helicopter all the way from top to. We landed in Nelspruit to do the customs. And I get there and I switch my phone and I get a message that says, no, no, can I be at the interview the next day? And while I'm looking at this thing, Donnie Pinar, who then later became my boss, tapped me on the shoulder, says, are you on your way to the interview? I said, well, I've just heard. So anyway, it was fascinating at that time there were several of my. My good old mates. Adrian Schrader, which you may know he was at first.

Robbie (13:29)

Yeah, I know Adrian. I know Adrian.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (13:31)

Adrian and I did a lot of kilometers across Africa of the elephants and Paul Funston, which you may also know, he. He works on lines and Stuff he, you know, all of us were interviewed for the same job. There were actually three jobs that we were interviewed for, different ones. So I was the one that got to the Sandparx job and I walked in here in 2008 with sand parks under enormous amount of pressure to aggressively do something about elephants. And that was shortly after, you may remember, there was a scientific roundtable in 2007, which I call it. It was the old farts meeting because when you look at the picture of that lot, it was Norman and Rob Slotto and Rudy and the late. Well, Rudy has also passed away now and the late Bob Scholes and, and I think John Hanks was also there.

Robbie (14:29)

Geez, I haven't heard, I haven't heard that name in a while. Bob Scholes, man. What was Bob's, what was Bob's wife's name?

Dr. Sam Ferreira (14:36)

Mary. Mary. Mary, Mary.

Robbie (14:39)

She was a soil ecologist. That's. I got all my soil ecology work out of Mary.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (14:44)

Yeah, yeah, but so, yeah, so we walked in here, that round table advice. The then minister, which was Minister Korbrook van Skalkwick, Martinez von Skalkwick, if you can remember him, and he. And they advised the minister to do some review. They did an elephant assessment that was a book that Bob Scholes, one of his major contributions, a proper scientific assessment. And the other thing that came out of that workshop is the first elephant management norms and standards were established in 2008. And that elephant management norms and standards are still active today. It creates lots of problems, but it's still active today. So I walked in here and said Fox in 2008, Long Sam was. Was.

Robbie (15:36)

Was the conversation that, that 2000, that big round table that happened in 2007, was that the TPC conversation that had come out of all the work or was that already had already been established?

Dr. Sam Ferreira (15:48)

That wasn't a TPC conversation. That was a, a time at a time when there were calls to cull again and all these other sort of things of mid-1990s. So that 1994. 94, is it 95 or whatever the moderatorium was the TPC development in San Parks happened in the.

Robbie (16:13)

And TPC for everybody listening was thresholds for potential concern. It was this idea that you could monitor certain objects, parameters, things in the, in the wild to alert you to something is changing and was a threshold like you're getting to a, hey, watch out, something's about to happen.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (16:32)

And as you will know that that, that TPC development was very strongly based coming from the water work that Kevin Rogers and Oliver that's right, that's right. We actually thought a great deal about TPCs and I started with, with that at that time, thinking a bit about it. And one of the difficulties was that when you get to terrestrial, the TPCs in the aquatic systems was a lot was around water flow and that sort of things, if you may recall, those are physical things that you can measure easily. The TPCs for the terrestrial stuff was a little bit more difficult. And there's a good special issue of Kudu published in 2011 was a special issue on strategic adaptive management. And there's actually a number of papers in there that really questioned or challenged how can we apply these threshold or potential concern concepts in systems. And we quickly realized that you need to start thinking about ecological processes and not necessarily the state of what a system is in. So that has made it a little bit more difficult. In fact, you know, I'm sure you can list it somewhere where if people want to go look at that, that particular one. But, but what it has done is. So when I arrived here in 2008, my first instruction is right, right, elephant management plan for all national parks. And we have five national parks.

Robbie (18:09)

So your job wasn't just Kruger.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (18:11)

No, no, but my job is still not Kruger. My job has always been right across all our national parks and it focuses on large mammal mammals. So that's anything from a Spielbox to an elephant. And essentially my job is to ensure that good science underpins our decision making. A qualifier also is it didn't say biological science. So I happen to now have done quite a lot of stuff in the criminal science and that sort of things as well because of the rhino issues, for example. But that's for another day. But if you go back to the elephant things, you know, I was thinking a great deal about at that time, the job was right, all five elephant management plans. We have elephants in Kruger, we have elephants in Mapungupe. Both those are elephants that don't have passports, they walk across the boundaries and Covid, they didn't do Covid tests, you know. And then we have elephants in Marakele, which is a traditionally fairly effectively fenced place. I always say if there's no fence that stops an elephant, that just slows them down. But there are some things where people are checking it up always and so forth. The other one is arrow along the history of arrow. And then the last one was the single elephant in the Garden Root National Park. Those days it was still the Chichigama and so forth. Okay, so when you look at, listen to that. The five examples I've given you is give you entire range of context, you know, And I started and we at that stage, we talked a lot. It wasn't me, it was a whole bunch of sandbox people thinking a lot a bit about how if the contexts are differing so much, what are the sort of underlying principles and things that we can work with. And slowly a whole bunch of new sets of information were coming in that. That gave us some very important understandings. I remember well when I walked in the first day in addo and my good old mate John Arendorf was the section ranger there and we talked a bit about elephants and that we immediately have to put the elephants on the pool in addo. And I actually asked and said, okay, John, why do we want to do that? And John said to me, no, because, you know, they cause psychological impact. Okay, let's just go through an exercise. And I did a small little Excel modeling exercise and show, you know, here's a population of elephants growing. They were growing at about 5% at that time. You needed to put about 88% of cows on the pole each year to be able to stop the population growth. So I said, but the difficulty is there are currently a bunch of small elephants and those small ones are going to become big elephants. So I've stopped by elephant numbers, but I don't stop necessarily elephant biomass. And in fact, that modeling that small little thing, we did it on the screen there to just help ourselves to understand that actually forecasted that we will, in the next generation of elephants, we're still going to have another 25% more elephant biomass in the landscape. So that told as well. It means that elephants are going to need 25% more foliage because they've got certain kilograms that have. And that started making me really think a little bit about what are some of the challenges with our assumptions around certain things in elephants. And as you know, we as people, we like to simplify things. And every person that I see nowadays,

Robbie (22:18)

you know, has an opinion about elephants.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (22:20)

No, they have. But the opinion, you're right, the opinion is absolutely right. The opinion usually starts with too many elephants, and then I'm asking too many for what? You know. So that was sort of the start of those days, you know. And yes, we've evolved a lot in our thinking since then because there were a lot of new insights, you know.

Robbie (22:40)

Yeah, for sure. Sam, can I ask you along the lines of those opinions? Ask a very basic question, because I know that you've thought through this A lot. You're probably the person who's thought through this the most, right? Because every day you're being, you're being challenged. Is there such a thing as too many elephants?

Dr. Sam Ferreira (22:58)

So that's a, that's probably the most important question that people, people ask. And now there's a very interesting bunch of papers and reflections. I think the very first guy that challenged the concept of carrying capacity or some other stocking rate was a guy by the name of Ser. He published a paper and he actually described the origins, where it come from. And the original, the original concept of carrying capacity was for what ships could hold in the, in the hulls.

Robbie (23:28)

Makes sense.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (23:29)

And then later that was converted to what a horse can have on his back, you know, and somewhere along the line somebody started using it for what the capacity is out there. Now I think the first thing is there is no ecosystem that hasn't got some other constraint on the resources. Okay, there's always something, you know, resources are not unlimited. But what I think is where we're missing the point is that that resource, what is available in the ecosystem is also not just stable. So you can imagine in a place like Kruger, I have got 35 different landscape types. Some of them are grasslands, some of them are woodlands. Whatever the case will be, you can imagine that those things have got different levels of biomass or resources sitting out there. You can also imagine after the rain that we've just had this two weeks of rain. I can tell you, I walk in the field now, the grass is above my head.

Robbie (24:32)

The resource allocation has changed.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (24:34)

The resources allocation, the resources is significantly more now this year than last year. So if I come around and I do the classical assessment of what is possible now this time I'm going to get a very different answer than if I were to do it in a dry season as an example. So that's the other bit that we have to experience. The third one, which is also important, which makes it really difficult to get to a single magic number, is that animals, especially big animals themselves, influence what's there. So you can imagine that the whole herd of buffaloes now walking through all this tall grass and they remove it. It's not available anymore for the thing, so that fluctuates all the time. So for a big place like Kruger, we have to accept that there is going to be an enormous amount of variance. And in fact, some of the published work has highlighted that you would expect that these for elephant, you would expect that the resources that will limit them will vary somewhere, if I remember correctly, between 2.2.1 elephant per square kilometer to something like 5 elephants per square kilometer. Now you translate that in numbers across this place, 20,000 to 110,000. In the whole it's up to 180,000, you know, so that's the reality that I think happens when you get to smaller places. A very different story because I'm often constrained. And here that is what. Remember that the application is primarily developed originally for agricultural purposes in South Africa. It's been translated to ecological purposes. But again, we must be careful not to manage managed to a number and think I've dealt with the issue and the reason for that is that when we looked at or when we saw the work that was published on elephant impact, so people, I think Rob Holdermont went and actually plotted the chains that happened when there were elephants against how many elephants were there. Now that seems a very logical thing. And what really concerned me is when I looked at that graph is not the high end when there's lots of elephants there impact. We know that we expect that to happen. But what was really confusing to me is why do I have as high elephant impact when the elephant densities were very low? And I had that both when it was in fenced or in not fenced areas. Okay, that, that certainly told me then that you, if you, if you've defined a, a number and I think, I don't say don't define number, treat it as a guideline, but beware that if I manage to whatever that number is on that small place or wherever it is, that I may actually create for myself a false sense of security because I may think, oh, everything is all good because I'm keeping arrows, elephants and 0.5 per square kilometer, whatever that might be. But actually some places in arrow get nailed anyway because that's what the relationship say. So that was really a big sort of thing that started thinking and me questioning the approaches of having a. Of expecting that one is going to have a specific magic number or a number for a particular place, one can expect there's going to be a hell of a range of that. One can also expect that that is not going to be constant over time.

Robbie (28:06)

Sam, you're alluding to this concept and I'm not going to take it for my own because a good friend of both of ours, Rich Sari, told me, sort of gave me this idea and this concept, but really it's the ice cream aisle concept, right? It's the. There's some really, when you look at Kruger national park, you've got these Aisles of different groceries. You said you've got 35 different biome types. You know, some of these aisles are ice cream aisles. Right. And if we were stuck in a grocery store, where would we start and where would we hang out? We'd hang out in the ice cream aisle. We wouldn't go to the kale aisle because that's terrible food. But it's still okay. But it's terrible. But here we're going to stay in the ice cream. We're not going to move from the ice cream aisle. Talk to me a little bit about. Because, you know, obviously we've had, we've had a, an opinion article about marula trees. Everyone says there's no marula trees anymore. There's no regeneration of marula trees, essentially them being an ice cream aisle kind of species. And. But that impact isn't like again, I've been to places in Kruger where I'm like, wow, this bao bao hasn't even had a single touch of an elephant.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (29:12)

Yeah.

Robbie (29:13)

You know, talk to me a little bit about that and I want to know, I want to know in those. That's where, as you said, it doesn't matter really the density of elephants because you could have one elephant or ten elephants in the landscape or a thousand elephants. That ten elephant is going to sit in the ice cream aisle and just have just as much impact as the thousand.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (29:38)

Yeah. So I think, I think that's a very important point to. And this was actually probably the insight that came from thinking a lot of time about why I'm really struggling to explain why there is high elephant impacts even at very low densities. And part of it's because of the ice cream effects. They like certain trees just like we like certain, certain ice creams, you know, and they would then go there. So. So even if I have removed elephants or shot elephants, you know, the ones that's left is also still liking the ice cream trees, you know, the ice cream species. The second thing is that happens is when you work on a place like Scala Kruger, if I do something in the southern Kruger, the guys and the elephants in the north of the park know nothing about that. You know, they still going to be doing what they think. So what we are talking here, Robbie, is actually elephant behavior. And part of elephant behavior is how they pick which, which aisle in the shop they're going to go to. Where do they go in the particular landscape. And that I think is what Richard and I thought a bit about a lot and has discussed a lot about this. So if this is the case, my. My sensible way of thinking about it is identifying the localities where elephants like to go spend time, where they then have got particular choices of trees that are going on and where they are causing lots of. It doesn't matter whether there's one going there or whether there's 20 going there or whether there's 400 going there. Okay? But the next critical point is not just say, okay, elephants are going there. I need to then understand what is making them going there, what are the factors that's going to drive them to go and spend time there. When they're there, what do they do? You know, an elephant that just walks through and have a drink and walk back has got a very different effect than a herd standing a baobab tree under a bob trap team plucking all the time at it, you know, so we need to have this kind of information. And if I understand, and I call this the mechanism, so what is the mechanism of elephants having influence at a locality? And I then sit back and say, as a manager, given that I know what that mechanism is, what is my best way to interfere with the mechanism? That is the approach. That is the approach. And I think that this approach took us a while to get there, but it is transferable to wherever I am, whether I am in Kruger or even when I am in a small place like Addo. And we see that in Addo, you know, I can tell you why elephants are spending a lot of time in certain places, because they like to go to the water. And in Addo specifically, there's no big trees. So for an elephant to cool down, it has to go to water to cool down. So they go to water far more often in the day, and they're not drinking, they're going to cool down. So you can now imagine that has got consequences for the places where they then go to. So now I must think as a manager, okay, if that is the mechanism, how can I interfere with it? How can I make the water perhaps less accessible for elephants, but still accessible for everybody else? In the Kruger case, can I carry on? And I tell you, you go, boy.

Robbie (33:01)

This is the beautiful thing about a podcast. This is.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (33:04)

No, that's good, that's good. So in the Kruger case, we actually had a very extensive exercise where we took all the knowledge that sits in the landscape. We've got rangers that has been here for a very long time. We've got pilots that are flying around, we've got field rangers that are walking around. We've got scientists that have been around the place. And we collectively said, so where are the localities in Kruger where we really worried about changes that are happening? And sometimes the changes don't happen because of elephants. Well, elephants are only a part of it. I actually traveled with Corlee Coetzeer from ranger section to ranger section. We got in Bucky's, we drove and we went to have a look and see what it was. In the end, our map makers, our GIS people went and they drew the things for us. So we've got 56 places that we identified like that in, but that's not where it stopped. We then sat down and said, okay, in each of these places, what is the ecological mechanisms or why is this an area of concern? What is ecological mechanisms that's resulting it. And how is elephants contributing to that? Okay, so that was a long exercise. It turns out that we eventually got the butt. Sorry about that. Switches. I'll. Stefano, Bill, I'll chat to you now. That's one of the guys working crocodiles with me. So. So we could identify that. There was at least eight reasons why we were concerned about places. Many of them was around social things. So for example, on the Crocodile river just north of the Leopard Creek golf course, there are some very well off stakeholders there that were concerned about that they sitting on their verandas and they are seeing on the other side of the river far less trees than what's on their side.

Robbie (35:18)

Yeah, the destruction of trees.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (35:19)

Yeah, getting water, you know, but this side's getting water. Cause they're watering the golf course every day. But the primary concern was actually not the loss of trees, it was the fact that they're now seeing people driving. They don't want to see people driving. It moves that sense of wilderness for them, you know. So that's a very different thing than a normal ecological, ecological question. There were other areas, like up in the north of the park on our western boundaries, where the concerns is actually elephants that break fences and the fence breakages results in disease risks. Okay, because now buffalo can get over the fence. So if you now say, okay, well, elephants. I'll give that example before we go to the ecological ones. In that case, if you now say, okay, well, what is the reason why elephants break fences? Well, they only do it a certain time of the year. It happened to be at the time of the year when the marulas are busy fruiting. They know that there's marula trees outside, so they break the fence, go and have their marulas stand under the marulas. Sometimes they harass people's crop A bit, but usually they come back. So now the fence is broken and the buffalo is going up. How can I, given that mechanism, what would be a response for us there? And there are many people that are coming around and some years say, let's reduce the number of elephants. Other would say, why don't we put a water hole right next to the fence so they don't go there and all these sort of things. Dani and I said, well, why don't we build a fence that's low enough that the elephant can climb over? Because I'm dealing, I'm still, I'm retaining the, the disease barrier and the elephant is not breaking my disease barrier and he's still good using and to come back. So that's, that's an example of what I said when you, when you go through this, this process that you're asking those questions. And I'll get back to exactly how we do that process, but I hope that helps.

Robbie (37:22)

Robbie Sam, of the 56 areas, or the 56 areas, in your expert opinion of everything that you've collected, all this data, citizen scientists, rangers, pilots, whatnot, how many of those 56 areas are impacted because of the number of elephants, the density of elephants.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (37:41)

So there's not a single one that is linking to that, but there is a lot that is linked to the activity of elephants. So Corlee and myself and a whole bunch of people after we now dis draw on the map where these 56 areas are, we then looked, went and look at remote sensing on changes in tree abundance. And we essentially actually asked, so how, how accurate were we about where we put these, these localities? And I tell you what, the rangers know their place.

Robbie (38:14)

It is remarkable how, it's amazing how anecdotal, anecdotal information really fits with science, right?

Dr. Sam Ferreira (38:22)

So it's remarkable how that match with what we actually saw with remote sense signals of tree changes. So there are places that trees increase, there's places that decrease. So a lot of the sites overlap very nicely with these abrupt tree changes. There was some other measures which we used looking at indices of ecosystem function. So these are also remote sense layers, data that you can use. And we had very similar patterns. But what was really fascinating, Robbie, is when we overlaid elephant density on this, that didn't match.

Robbie (38:58)

So. Okay, let's pause for a second, let's pause for a second. What you're saying is the 56 areas that you've determined as these ice cream

Dr. Sam Ferreira (39:06)

aisles,

Robbie (39:09)

they did not correlate with areas of incredibly high density of elephants.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (39:16)

So there wasn't a knitting. It was places that had big changes that actually very few elephants. That is. Sorry, I must must say these are based on elephant surveys that was done in the dry season. Remember that's a time and we can survey. So yes, there is a snapshot that happens, but that's also the time you would expect that elephants is going to be targeting trees, you know, because there's no grass.

Robbie (39:43)

And, and Sam, let me just, just so that I don't lose this, you did say that based on remote sensing work that you've done in the park, you have areas in the park where you said you're increasing in tree canopy cover.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (39:57)

There are places where it's increasing this. There are also, there are also increases in woody cover and much of this actually associate with, with increases in atmospheric carbon. I think William Bond, before he passed away, he actually did some work work on that. The woodification or the bush thickening often and those sort of things, they also happen. But interestingly enough, when you have elephants in the landscape, that doesn't happen as fast or it is even reducing. So in some ways we are dealing with two things here. We've got elephant influences, but then elephants help. We deal with the climatic influences, that this also helps the global warming influences and that sort of things. But I think the important point was that we have identified these localities. We checked how well did we do by looking at some of the measures, the responses of ecosystems. We then checked, okay, well our elephants abundance is linked to us. Not very simple link, but when we go back to every one of those ones and we started asking what is the mechanism that is happening where it usually related to four different things. I keep the last and the first is a critical resource where water is. So in some places there's only spring that is available to you. Like Malaslapanga up in the north. Okay, an elephant spend some time there. But now in the old days, I'll get back to that, but let me first go to the other ones. The second one is a food type. So what kind of trees are where, you know, where is the ice cream species or the ice cream or the ice cream isles as Richard, as I like it, you know, the third one was a really interesting one. And this is. Elephants are seeking comfort. And let me explain this to you. So this is about when you take a thermal camera or video or something of an elephant herd in the hot dry season, those little calves look like stock streets. They're very overheated. So there has been some really good work done that illustrated that elephant cows choose landscapes in the hot dry season, when it's very hot, okay, that warms down, warms up slower. Okay. So. And they do it because the little calves have to regulate the body temperatures. They really have a hard time. You would see when you drive around in the north of the park, for example, you get to a big boa baptree or a sausage tree, you'll have a herd of elephant stand underneath here, have a little bit of a look with the binoc and see. And you often see the calves lying down. And they're lying down and they kick sand open and they're lying down partly to cool down. The sand was cooler there. And what is fascinating, in that hot dry season, at night, the cows choose places that are cooling down faster than anywhere else. So now you can imagine that if there's certain things in the landscape which happen to be a place which is cooling down faster than everybody else at night, and that also happens to be where nice trees are, you know, I can have effects. So again, that's an example of our resource dictate. I hope that makes sense.

Robbie (43:21)

Yeah, it makes great sense. Makes great sense.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (43:24)

The last one. Yeah, the last one. You're waiting for this, eh? The last one was really surprising because Dani Pinar and I sat one day and we looked at a map of where people used to live in Kruger. And that was made from lots of archaeological evidence and history and so forth. And we thought that this looks suspiciously, very close to where the elephant impact areas are, you know, and we started thinking a little bit about it. And what we think happens, and I think Richard has spoken to you a bit about this as well, is that historically there was a lot of people that lived in Kruger at. At some. Some guys even say at the time in Chaka Zulu was busy rearranging everybody in southern Africa, that there might have been 50 to 100,000 people living in Kruger. Where would they have lived and what would.

Robbie (44:21)

On the rivers. On the rivers.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (44:22)

On the rivers. They. And when you go to river. I mean, I can. When you visit me one day, hopefully. Robbie, I'll go show you. You don't walk very fast.

Robbie (44:30)

I'm going to come see you in May. You just don't know it yet.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (44:33)

Well, that's good. That's good, eh? You might have to come and catch crocs with us, eh?

Robbie (44:38)

Ah, I twist my rubber arm. Just you, not the croc.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (44:43)

No, no, no, that's fine. So. So we saw that there are at least three different activities that people did one Is they, they would have obviously had some, some cattle, but it's not a very successful thing in the low field because of the diseases. But they, they grew crops next to river, next to rivers and, and hot springs or springs and things like that. They had some hunting zones which, particularly up in the Northern Park Lataba, those areas. And then they were mining. When you think about some of those mining localities now when you're mining iron as a, as a person with not a lot of technology, you are harvesting a lot of trees, you know, to be able to create that warmth and all that sort of things. So what we hypothesize and what we think has happened historically is that elephants are now spending much more time in localities where people used to be. And that is because that danger that people created when they were present is not there anymore. So this is a major, major difference. So that is the fourth one is. The fourth resource is safety. So elephants responses. Have you got the four now? Water.

Robbie (46:00)

Yeah. And safety and water seem to have overlapped quite a much, quite a bit, would you say?

Dr. Sam Ferreira (46:05)

Overlapped a lot. And what would happen is that elephants would need to drink water. So it's a compulsory resource, an obligatory resource. But if there's danger, you know, when would the elephant go to go drink water? And how long will he spend time

Robbie (46:24)

in the place at night and not spend a lot of time. Exactly.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (46:30)

Off we go, you know, so, so a really big part of us in dealing with these areas of concern, having unpacked these mechanisms at every one of these 56 places, we can break it down to these four things or something else doing it. Sometimes fire is involved, you know, sometimes alien species and things like that. We needed to think, okay, it makes no sense to control numbers at large scale in Kruger. We did it for a long time and we culled for a long time. And our purpose for culling was to reduce numbers at a large scale. Now, before I go on talking about what we're thinking about these areas, one of the things that happened also with our culling before. So if you need to cull 500 elephants a year, practically, where will you do that?

Robbie (47:21)

You know, out of the. Yeah, not in the rivers, in the, in the places that are easy for you to access.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (47:27)

Yeah, easy for you to access. I can get my truck scene etc, the elephants know you're coming, there's helicopters flying all over the place or whatever the case might be. And what would an elephant do if that happens? Now you shot three herds and then Mopane felt what, what does the remaining elephants, do they move, disappear?

Robbie (47:47)

Yeah.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (47:47)

And then, but they then typically go sit in the places that are now safe, which happen to be the areas that I'm concerned about. So I actually historically may have inadvertently, without me knowing, have accentuated local impact on those areas of concern that we worry about. We don't have evidence for that. There's one study that has highlighted how our elephant, how quickly elephants moved out of areas, but we don't know where they moved to, you know, and then how quickly the next year, when they're not culling there anymore, how quickly they come back. Very often you then they double the density back, you know, so. So this is all the insights that came to. Now we got back to the spot and say, all right, I have got these, I've got these local areas of concern. I have got mechanisms. When I unpacked those mechanisms, we started thinking, well, sometimes the mechanism is a soft mechanism. You know, it's a nice grassy patch in the wet season. So you can probably get an elephant away from there pretty quickly by disturbing it to a banger or something like that. But when it is a only water resource and the mechanism was a historic danger landscape, how do I manage that now? How do I simulate that process? And, you know, we don't have the luxury of going to catch humans and reintroduce them into the world. Is that what we normally do? If any other man,

Robbie (49:19)

I would have, you know, you're probably the most talked about individual from. Dare I say it's not controversial. What we're talking about is not controversial, but in the grand scheme of things, it is okay.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (49:30)

It is, yeah.

Robbie (49:31)

If Sam Ferreira is now on the headline news saying that he's going to catch some humans and release them in Kruger, my man, you're in trouble.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (49:39)

Well, some people might actually think it's okay. Now, the point is that that's an extreme example, but it highlighted that we needed to think about. We cannot in principle, as an organization, we have a philosophy of I want to maintain the ecological processes if they're intact. If they're not, I want to restore them. But in this case, it's difficult to restore it. So now I have to ask, how do I assimilate them? So how do I actually do it? As if. And this is where Richard and myself have thought a lot about. So how do one create these landscapes of fear? A landscape of fear and a landscape of fear has got two elements in the formal literature. One is an animal know where the danger is, but he doesn't know when the danger come. This is like you and me, you know, when we visiting a rough place in the world and I don't want to put names, I just now get in trouble. But if you know that that place is dangerous at night, we don't go there at night, but we go there in the day.

Robbie (50:45)

That's right.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (50:46)

But if I know that this place is always dangerous and the danger can come anytime, I don't go there at all. You know, that's the same sort of thing. So how do we manage? There is a third element, particularly for elephants that are important and this is what kind of danger is coming. So you know where it's dangerous, but as an elephant you don't know when the danger comes. And secondly, you don't know what kind of danger is coming. So this should then induce a lot of behavioral changes where the activity of elephants are likely to far be far less concentrated if you get that landscape of fear. Out of interest, a lot of people are uncomfortable with a concept of scaring elephants or the landscape of fear. In some of our original discussions we actually called it areas of increased vigilance to try and get that perspective.

Robbie (51:45)

Call it whatever you need to call it. Right?

Dr. Sam Ferreira (51:46)

Yeah. But I think what I'm trying to say is that the process of unpacking the mechanisms has given us a lot of different ways of thinking a little bit about a technical problem now is how do I implement this kind of ideas in the areas of concern. But it doesn't help. Like flying with a helicopter and now target elephants to chase them away or shoot them or whatever the case might be. Because what have I made the elephants scared of? Made a scare of a helicopter. I have not let him connect it to what that area is.

Robbie (52:20)

So this is part of the landscape.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (52:22)

Exactly, yeah. So this is part of what we, what what we are now in the process of developing. In terms of how do you actually give value in implementing this concept of

Robbie (52:34)

a landscape of you, Sam, when you've got these 56 areas now, obviously each one is going to have maybe a tailor made approach to it. Right. Some of them will be the same

Dr. Sam Ferreira (52:46)

and of those I can tell you now, there are five that we've identified that at the present dynamics that are happening in the landscape, we also know things might change. So some areas may be very different in future, that those are places the mechanism suggesting to us that we have to have an aggressive intervention and that we will need to remove and call some elephants there. But remember now, the purpose of culling

Robbie (53:11)

is one to try it's not population control anymore.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (53:15)

But let now put a, put a, a damper on that because under South Africa's current norms and standards, okay, I am not allowed to actually scare elephants. I'm not allowed to call to disturb elephants, which is what we're talking about here. So we actually have to phrase our approach that in those local areas of concern, we would like to cull to reduce the densities. But we know that you, if you do that, you're going to have an effect, which we've experienced when we culled before, that elephants is going to be able to respond and move somewhere else so they can help us reduce the local densities as well.

Robbie (53:56)

So in the norms and standards, you can, you can use culling to reduce densities, but that's not the actual. That is the route in which you can operate under the norms and standards, but it's not the reason why you're not reducing it for density reduction. You're creating this landscape of fear.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (54:17)

Yeah. And we have to be careful how we phrase it, and I'm speaking very frankly with you here, and I'm sure it will come out, but South Africa has probably learned a lot about how we can think about elephants differently. Hopefully some of these ideas that I'm sharing with you can also be applied in other areas. But there is indeed a significant challenge by the current legal framings that we have got. So, for example, it's actually difficult for me to go rationalize under the current legal framework to even go shoot bangers off to scare elephants or places, because the Normstone standards doesn't tell me, doesn't allow me to do to disturb elephants. It allows me to reduce densities. So those are some of the things that is a very arse reality and has been a source of certain frustration for me, but I think also for several of our colleagues that we are struggling to implement the ecological understandings and, and some of the things I've explained to you now to the full extent, and maybe even be more fair to elephants than what historically has been the case.

Robbie (55:34)

Sam, one of the things, the biggest hurdle that I see, you specifically me talking about it, all of us sort of the practitioners in this landscape, and really it's talking to the general public because the general public says this. How can you say that? I see that there's 30,000 elephants in Kruger and you're saying there's no elephant, there's no tree damage because of that many elephants, right. They see this like that doesn't make any sense. More elephants means more damage. That's the mindset, right? How do you get that across, Sam?

Dr. Sam Ferreira (56:16)

So I think this is what, what has been a little bit frustrating for me and probably because I have, because we have not been telling the story. If I'm telling you that there are 60,000 elephants and there is no clear relationship between how many elephants you've got and what are the ecological impacts. It doesn't mean there's not ecological impacts. There's a ton of ecological impacts and

Robbie (56:38)

I think that's very, that's key. Exactly. What you're just saying is key because people see the marula trees going, right? They see the baobabs getting smoked. Yeah.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (56:46)

And I am as concerned of when I'm seeing marula trees. I also like a marula, you know, and I see these things going. But I have to unpack and say to me, okay, does the simplification by simply reducing elephants number going to bring marulas back? Okay. And the data tells me that when I have got high elephant numbers, I've got lots of elephant impact and I've also got lots of positive things. When I've got low elephant numbers, I also have got lots of elephant impact and I have got lots of positive stuff. And this is why we needed to think, well, what is, what is that reason? And the reason is because it's the activity of elephants that is primarily mattering and secondary only maybe elephant numbers and things like that.

Robbie (57:35)

So I think that's, that's critical. So now I want you to answer this next question because I think a lot of people that are, that know of the systems would probably have this next question, which is, so when we're, if you, if you rewind the clock 30 years, right now we're sitting in the mid-90s where everybody's remembering these big marula groves or baobabs that didn't really have any impact. There were still elephants on the landscape then. There's more elephants on the landscapes now. We have no Marulas left today. There were lots of marulas then. Is it the ice cream effect? Is it the ice cream isle effect or what has changed?

Dr. Sam Ferreira (58:16)

So I think, first of all, there's a couple of things in this question. I like the question. Our 30 year window is very useful for our own reference and you probably like me, our reference and expecting lots of marulas is based on when we first got to the park. Very interestingly, the work published way back in the 60s, or no, sorry, later, showed that trees were busy falling over before we even started culling elephants. And then trees kept on falling over when we were culling elephants, so many people say, well, we didn't cull enough elephants, you know. Now that is telling me that there are other dynamics busy happening. So if we shift our reference window to far longer back because I mean, I've always been baffled when I, when I listen to so many people, particularly when we are talking about concerns of elephants disappearing in Africa, that there were millions of elephants before. I then couldn't help asking myself, so where the hell do the trees come from?

Robbie (59:27)

Well, listen, I don't want to even go down this rabbit hole because we'll get stuck for an hour, but me and you should have another conversation about whether or not there were millions of elephants on the African continent.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (59:39)

That's never a question we should ask, but in the Kruger context there's a very interesting history and certainly the late Tol Pinar and his book of history, he described a lot of the human presences in this landscape before this roundabout 1800s and so forth. But it seems like Certainly before the 1700s there were some people in the landscape, probably elephants, as many as what they are around now, 30 odd thousand or whatever the else might be. But then things happened, the Arabs and the Portuguese and the slave trade and everything else happened and that happened along with ivory and ivory killed a lot of elephants. When you look at the export records, oh, it's unbelievable.

Robbie (60:30)

I've got so many hypotheses tied to that. It's unbelievable.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (60:34)

It's unbelievable. But what it does look like an allure for archaeological evidence suggested is that you ended up with probably a good 150 to 200 years of very low elephant use of a place like Kruger. Then in the 1890s we had Rune, which cleaned out a whole bunch of other herbivores and stuff like that. So you had a period then since then and you know, the park was established and slowly these various species recovered. But there was a good 150 years where this ecosystem was developing without major herbivory disturbances. There might have been human disturbances, fires and all these other sort of things, you know, so that by the time we became concerned about things in the 1960s, you know, this was a concern that was linked to a reference point which may be a very artificial reference point. You know, it doesn't mean the whole Kruger was a grassland, you know, before the 1700s. It just means the place was much more patchy and there were probably far fewer trees and the trees were probably assisted by wherever people were busy harassing elephants or the seasons were changing, etc. Etc. So that although for many people seeing that like you and I will experience, while some trees has disappeared in some places, although I've now had the absolute privilege of walking Kruger a lot and you'd certainly get into places where you wish. I hope there was more elephants cleaning trees out here because man, it's looking dangerous now. But I think the reference point that we are using currently where the changes that we're observing in the landscape, for some people it is a negative change, for other people it might actually be an improvement. The system recovering to whatever it was before and the conditions that prevailed for 200, 250 years that led to a reference point which in so many of our minds may probably never prevail again. And that sort of things. And hence, Robbie, this is an important point, hence a shift that we have started making about managing the ecological processes rather than for a Pacific state or how Kruger should look like, you know, and I think when you do that then your questions become very different. You then start asking questions, well, what are the processes that would sustain this? So as soon as I now see, well, here's an ecological process that are absent, people that are used to disturbing elephants, that's not happening anymore. Now I start having issues at local scales, then I am within that framework of managing the ecological processes that created this landscape with all its fluxes and flows of biodiversity and ecosystem services and benefits that people got from it.

Robbie (63:37)

Do you think talking to that point it seems a little biopic of us looking at this 30 year window versus very difficult for us to see a 100 year window. Even more difficult to think beyond that. Thinking back and maybe I got a couple of other questions and we can wrap this up. If we thought about 100 years ago. Again, this is debatable in terms of what I'm about to say that say there was the same amount of elephants in the Kruger landscape as it is today. Back then it was a very much not very much. It was a completely open system, come and go, wet and dry seasons they would migrate just like you're seeing in the Okavango Delta, Zambia, areas with elephant movement. Obviously Kruger is attempting right now to make it as open of a system connecting to others as possible. What are your thoughts there to connectivity and how that sort of the closed system changes the dynamics again of the ice cream aisle effect and whatnot.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (64:38)

So let me start off with. We spoke a bit what the consequences were of people in the landscape that created elephant dangerous areas were scared or fear landscape.

Robbie (64:50)

Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (64:52)

And that that evolved historically so elephants Were always responding in the landscape to wherever danger is. The difficulty now is dangers now are many more places than they were before and they still responding to that. What is absolutely fascinating, Robbie, is that in the, in all the years that research has happened here in Kruger, there's always been a lot of research that, you know, when, when people study elephants, the first thing they do is to put a collar on it. You know, a satellite transmitting a satellite tracking collar, you know, so. But this has been incredibly useful for us. And what is absolutely fascinating is how Kruger Krueger at the moment is about maybe two thirds of it has got a fence. That fence is not there to keep elephants out. That fence is actually often for either international boundary or for a disease reason. And typically, as I said to you before, a fence just slows an elephant down. What is really fascinating is that over the years we've had, I, I looked at the collared elephants and I asked all the people that is at colored elephants that please make a, a core home range for me in the September and in August and September each year, whenever they had data, that's when we normally count elephants.

Robbie (66:12)

And for everybody, August and September is the driest part of the year in Kruger.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (66:17)

Yeah. So that's what we normally count them because it's the driest part. We can see elephants, the leaves are gone, etc. What was absolutely fascinating is that as time went on, we now have up to 18% of elephants that were collared in the park. They have their dry season core home raids outside the park. Park. So they busy shifting and moving. Okay. So they're busy colonizing actually they mostly going east into. Into Lopo and so forth.

Robbie (66:47)

The second has that, has that, has that changed over time? Sam, sorry to interrupt you. Is this because of density, Density changes pushing elephant?

Dr. Sam Ferreira (66:55)

Yeah, but remember, it's not just us. There's also one zoo that has also elephants that goes. It's not just Krueger. But the other thing that's fascinating is you can of course now also track every individual elephant and tell how did they walk about. And it is remarkable. Elephants that were captured and colored in Kruger. And I say captured because I don't know if it's a Kruger elephant. It might have come from somewhere else. And I caught it here. Okay. They are now wandering around all the way to Maputu Elephant reserve on the coast in Mozambique. They, some of them even had a swim in the sea apparently. I didn't see it on the satellite. That's what I heard. They, some of them came back and they're moving right through Swaziland back to Kruger across all kinds of different landscapes that has got different fear levels of people. We have got elephants that are shifting between us and Gonorrhezu in, in Zimbabwe and the whole even. But not. There's some things some elephants has moved from, from Gonorrhea Zoo down to Zenaof and Benin. Okay. The point is when you plot this together on the thing, you know, you have to look very, very hard to find where Kruger's boundaries. You know, elephants are busy moving and they're busy responding to opportunities to things that is happening. One other thing that is really interesting, Robbie, was the was work that was done on the genetics. And in fact it looks like there is every now and then a elephant bulls from as far as Chobee visit us and come and have some fun with our cows. So these movements that are now coming out from all these studies actually suggest two things. One is the original idea of a transfrontier conservation area, the Greater Limpopo one was about connectivity and giving opportunity for things to move. Now they're moving around. They do. They're doing it so well, the elephants, that they've connected up three to four different trans frontier conservation areas. You know, elephants and Kruger and the GLTFCA gone down there all the way down to the Lebombo one which is between the northern part of Kozuna, Natal and and Mozambique. But it does create some issues for us because you can now imagine elephants finding themselves in spaces where they perceive things are safe outside protected areas. They're going to come into contact with more people and that kind of interaction is not going to be a good one. The interaction that elephants have got with people on Kruger a lot you're very friendly one somebody in a and a game viewing truck or its own drive vehicle that are enjoying elephants. But when it's outside it's different. And I think one of the critical challenges for the countries that are managing elephant populations together like this is that we do not have agreed upon rules and processes on dealing with things in the right way with local people when elephants are interacting with people in these bad spaces. So this is an area of development that I think we need to do.

Robbie (70:12)

Sam, last question. Do you think we've hit the sort of asymptote of elephants in Kruger? Do you see that? Because obviously you're looking at. You talked about gonorrhezo already. Gonorrhezo elephant population has sort of like hit a maximum, have reached sort of a density dependent capacity and is now fluctuating again because of climatic reasons, resource dependence, those kinds of things. Are we there yet with Kruger or what do you think?

Dr. Sam Ferreira (70:41)

So I can actually tell you more than what I think. I can tell you a little bit from data that we've done. Okay, so yes, in the last five years Kruger has counted elephants and it fluctuated around 30 odd thousand. But some years there's 27,000, other years there's 34,000. And this is exactly what you expect is going to happen when movement happened in the landscape. So we went and we, we ask all the properties in the greater Limpopo transfront area for the elephant time series, for the counts that they've done using September and August and September. There are 21 of those time series that we've got, they of various quality. Some of them has only got a few points, others got very long, lengthy things. But what we could do is actually, actually model the trends that is in each one of these things and then we ask which ones of these trends are described best by a density dependent model. So density dependence mean as population growth increases or as population sizes increase or population growth decrease. Right.

Robbie (71:53)

The size of the population constrains the growth of the population, the size of

Dr. Sam Ferreira (71:57)

the population constrained, and that there is several ways how that happen. I can explain that. Quickly, as population increase and conditions and resources becomes bit more limiting for elephants, they typically move somewhere even if it gets a little bit more constrained or if their distance moving is a bit too tough for them, you start seeing the weaned calves die more often. Okay, so we know from work done that the further distance, daily distance that the breeding herds have to walk, those herds tend to have lower survival rate of the calves that just weaned. So those are calves that are three to four years old. So these calves don't have milk anymore. Now they gotta find their own resources. As you go even higher, you get other cascades happening. So next thing that happens is the young cows tend to have calves later. Then the next thing that happens is your very old elephants tend to die more often. They're struggling with their teeth that they've got and eventually your adults die. So, so there is a very good process how it happens. When you look at our data, 3 out of the 21 time series has got some signals that suggest that there is some of this density dependence taking place. One is Gonarozu and the other two is the southern Marula region in Kruger and the northern Marula region in Kruger.

Robbie (73:18)

What do you say there? What is the Marula region So the

Dr. Sam Ferreira (73:21)

Marula, the sand parks has broken up Kruger into two major regions. Zalaseni, which is the northern half north of the Ulifans river, and Marula, which is the southern half. And then in the Marula region, roughly south of the Sabi river is Marula south, and north of the Sabi river up to the Ulifans river is Marula north. Okay, so that was fascinating. So we at least have three time series that look like some things are busy happening. It's constraining the populations. There is a second thing that we did, the publication some time ago, it actually called. The publication had a very provocative title that said African elephants is only a third or a quarter of what they can be. But one of the things that that paper did, it actually calculated what is the likely densities in various biohomes where elephant populations are likely to fluctuate. So we took that and looked at what that Kruger one is at what the Mozambique area was at what Gonorrho Zoo is. And at present, after 21 time series, two of those time series has gone beyond the envelope that was predicted from, so higher than what the top end of the, of the, of this envelope is. And there are six that are not in that envelope yet. So the, the evidence suggests that there are weak signals of some density dependence kicking in the entire region. And the most likely mechanism is how elephants are busy responding and moving to resources. We have, we haven't scrutinized AIDS and sex structures yet to see if there are signals that are telling us that calf survival is busy decreasing or something like that. Having said that, the entire GLTFCA's elephant growth is just over 3%, 3.1%, and that is nearly half of what it was a decade ago when it was 6%, 6.7% or 6, something like that. So that's just what the data is telling us. You know, yes, there's, there's. You all know, if you count, if you count elephants, there's always variance and things like this, but that's the best that we can get from what we've got.

Robbie (75:45)

Sam, I think the most notable thing that's come out of this podcast is you guys. Aren't you, as the large mammal ecologist of Sand Parks, your colleagues, the people around you, are taking elephant management very seriously, number one. And number two, it is absolutely rooted in the best data that you have. Yeah, it's not haphazard. It's not just like we're just letting things go. Like, we'll just see what happens

Dr. Sam Ferreira (76:21)

now. You Captured that. And I think probably a very, very important take home message is that when we are saying that we are not managing elephant numbers, we are not saying that there's no elephant impact. Okay. We actually very much aware that there are elephant impact at high and at low elephant numbers. And it's for that reason why we want to target the areas where they are causing problems and do it in the right way.

Robbie (76:49)

What I actually love about this is the evolution. If you're a scientist and a manager is we don't know everything, right?

Dr. Sam Ferreira (76:59)

Yeah.

Robbie (76:59)

And we've got, we test ideas, we understand the outcomes, we evaluate the outcomes. Can we be better? Can we be more strategic, can we be more ecological? And if you look at elephant management strategies from the early 1990s to today, look at the evolution of elephant management that has occurred in that timeframe. How we as humans, as we as ecological managers, have now started to really hone in on elements that we didn't even talk about in the early 1990s in environments that have, you know, arguably hundred times more humans in it. Way more regulatory processes, way more constraints on things. And we're still learning today. Like you Talked about these 56 high impact areas and what you do in them and whatnot. Right.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (77:48)

And I can guarantee you, Robbie, the learning doesn't stop here. In 10 years from now, you will talk to my successor and he's probably going to tell you that Ferreira was completely wrong. And I think this is the important bit. When you are dealing with managing complex systems like that, you actually have to have the guts to try things differently. And yes, we as humans by nature are very uncomfortable changing, especially when we get older, like me. But I do think it doesn't remove us from the responsibility to think clearly and being prepared to make changes when that happens.

Robbie (78:34)

Well, Sam, I really appreciate this podcast man. I really appreciate your time. I know that you're a busy guy, emails and phones and stuff going off, but look, I hope this isn't the last time we get to do this. Maybe next time in May we can do this in person with a glass of red wine or whiskey in our hand next to a fire.

Dr. Sam Ferreira (78:51)

I'm looking very forward to that and thank you for the opportunity. I think it's really important that we can have an opportunity to try and explain to people what the thinking is and certainly also what the action is that we would like to do. But I appreciate it. Thanks, Robbie.

Robbie (79:10)

No, you're welcome, my man. All right, well, that's it for today. Appreciate you listening as always. Leave a review, share it with your friends and most importantly, do what's right to convey the truth around hunting.