麻豆传媒

News — UC San Diego School of Biological Sciences’ Shermin de Silva has spent the majority of her scientific career studying elep8ghants. An assistant professor in the Department of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution, de Silva researches the ecology, social dynamics and communication of the massive endangered herbivores. that indicates that the habitats of Asian elephants has shrunk by nearly two-thirds over the past 300 years. She is also the president and founder of , a non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation of elephants and their habitats. De Silva recently published a book compiling more than 20 years of research on African and Asian elephants. In recognition of Earth Day 2025, de Silva discusses the book’s insights on the complex nature of protecting elephants, and its invitation to readers to engage in thought-provoking questions that will help navigate the future of elephants and their habitats.

You’ve been studying elephants for nearly 20 years. What was behind your initial interest in researching these animals?

Elephants tend to fascinate people not just because of their sheer size but because they are social animals that show all sorts of interesting behavior. For me, the appeal of Asian elephants specifically was the fact that despite having been so intertwined with human cultures for millennia, it was still a wild animal about which we knew relatively little. Although we are used to seeing them in captivity, they have never truly been domesticated. Growing up in Sri Lanka, they were always part of the cultural context and I took them for granted. So it came as a shock to learn, many years later, that this was in fact a highly endangered species. I was curious whether wild Asian elephants were as similar to African elephants as people tended to assume, what their social lives were like and how they communicated. It also allowed me to work in Sri Lanka, where I had my roots.

What’s it like studying such enormous creatures in the wild?

At first, I didn’t know what to expect. The population I chose to study, in a national park in Southern Sri Lanka called Udawalawe, was relatively skittish and not very used to people. I wasn’t sure how close we could get, or what would be risky. But it didn’t take long for us to get comfortable with each other. Once I started to be able to recognize individuals, a new story unfolded each day. I’ve been fortunate to be able to watch elephants at peace, undisturbed, sometimes with their little calves around them. At times it feels like a Zen activity, other times there can be excitement. But more than anything else, there is a sense of mystery in trying to understand why they behave as they do.

What was your motivation behind writing the book?

The book was originally initiated by myself and a colleague who works on African elephants. We felt that there had been a lot of interesting research that had really taken off since previous books about elephants, and there was also nothing that really focused on behavior and conservation explicitly. When life circumstances overtook my colleague, I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of continuing. But the ideas were already there and I decided that the project was still worth completing — it just took maybe twice as long as we had intended!

You published your book in hopes of inspiring a new generation of researchers and conservationists. Why is that important?

There is still a lot to learn about elephants and the more populations we can study, the more comparisons we can make to gain a better understanding of the species, both for its own sake and for the sake of the people who live near them. No two individuals and no two populations are exactly the same. But, we are racing against time — many elephant populations are threatened with extinction, in Southeast Asia especially so. There are also many challenges when elephants are trying to survive on an increasingly fragmented and changing landscape. This species has been around longer than humans were humans. It has a unique evolutionary, ecological and cultural history. There is a lot of work to be done to try and ensure that elephants and people can continue sharing the landscape into the future.

Elephants are charismatic, yet many people don’t realize they are under threat. What are some of the complexities involved in protecting them?

That is one of the strange paradoxes. So many people love elephants, but may tend to view them more like cuddly stuffed animals, not realizing what it means to be a wild elephant in a sea of human activity. In order to meet their basic nutritional needs, elephants need to move — they can’t simply survive in parks and protected areas. But moving is becoming increasingly difficult, especially with the constant temptation of agricultural crops. Elephants are good at problem-solving and highly adaptable. But that can also be a liability, such as when they break barriers or into people’s homes. They can be incredibly tolerant of people, so long as people are tolerant of them. But that condition of mutual respect and care is eroding. Adding to all of this, climate change will require elephant populations to move to different areas entirely — including across national borders. This creates not just ecological and social challenges, but political ones as well.

In recognition of Earth Day 2025, what are some of the environmental protection lessons for the public described in the book?

One is that we need to re-think the way that conservation is conducted. Conservation doesn’t mean putting wildlife into protected areas and expecting them to stay there, unchanged, as though in a giant museum. Nature is ever-changing, and we need to adjust our spaces to safely accommodate wildlife, whether in our backyards, cities or agricultural lands. Another very important part is recognizing that humans have always shaped ecosystems in very important ways. We are not and cannot live apart from nature — it is not something that is just out there to be enjoyed on weekends. So we need to behave responsibly, think long-term and take care of it so that it will provide for us and our future generations.

What are some of the future-looking questions and puzzles that still need answers that you invite readers to consider?

Elephant communication, which was one of the things that originally interested me, still remains very much a mystery. We know that elephants are among the few mammals, besides ourselves, that are capable of vocal imitation but whether they do so in the wild, and to what use they put such an ability is completely unknown. For instance, do different elephant populations of the same species have different vocal dialects, as some birds and whales do? Advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence are promising and might allow this question to be addressed in the future, if adequate amounts of data can be systematically collected. Another is what other kinds of behaviors are socially learned and may have aspects of culture. For example, are food preferences passed on from mothers to calves, or learned by copying others in social groups? We know that older individuals of both sexes can be important for modelling behavior and calves pay close attention to what others are eating. This has implications for the potential of wild populations to adapt to changing habitats, as well as whether elephants can be introduced intentionally to suitable areas as a conservation measure.