The deaths of two Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) in August 1996 led the United States Department of Agriculture to require the testing and treatment of elephants for tuberculosis. From August 1996 to September 1999. Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection was confirmed by culture in 12 of 118 elephants in six herds. Eight diagnoses were made antemortem on the basis of isolation of M. tuberculos...

Modeling mice in an effective and scalable manner is one of the main challenges in the performance evaluation of IP networks. Mice is the name that has become customary to identify short-lived TCP connections, that form the vast majority of packet flows over the Internet. On the contrary, long-lived TCP flows, that are far less numerous, but comprise many more packets, are often called elephant...

Human-elephant conflict (HEC) threatens the survival of endangered Asian elephants (Elephas maximus). Translocating "problem-elephants" is an important HEC mitigation and elephant conservation strategy across elephant range, with hundreds translocated annually. In the first comprehensive assessment of elephant translocation, we monitored 16 translocations in Sri Lanka with GPS collars. All tran...

Chemical investigations, based on previously substantiated behavioral interactiorts, have identified specific contpounds or combinations of compounds in emissions from captive Asian elephants, Elephas maximus, that are biologically active, eliciting either previously observed behaviors or new reactions. In addition, these emissions vary with the age, sex and hornton.al stqte of a particular ele...

Asian elephants are only found in a very small area of southern China with a total number of individuals less than 200. They occur in bamboobroadleaf mixed forests along gullies and rivers, at altitudes under 1000 m. Current elephant habitat is highly fragmented and consists of isolated patches situated among extensive stretches of tea and rubber plantations, and croplands. Habitat loss and poa...

The elephant population in Kruger National Park, Republic of South Africa, is growing rapidly. To prevent damage to the Park’s ecosystems, the management has culled about 7% of the population annually. Such culls are very controversial. At first glance, contraceptives seem an attractive alternative means of control. We examine contraception as a management option, review the relevant aspects of...

The current study provides details of sleep (or inactivity) in two wild, free-roaming African elephant matriarchs studied in their natural habitat with remote monitoring using an actiwatch subcutaneously implanted in the trunk, a standard elephant collar equipped with a GPS system and gyroscope, and a portable weather station. We found that these two elephants were polyphasic sleepers, had an a...

Nonrandom patterns of mating and dispersal create fine-scale genetic structure in natural populations - especially of social mammals - with important evolutionary and conservation genetic consequences. Such structure is well-characterized for typical mammalian societies; that is, societies where social group composition is stable, dispersal is male-biased, and males form permanent breeding asso...

African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) are an ecologically and economically important species in many African habitats. However, despite the importance of elephants, research on their parasites is limited, especially in wild populations. Currently, we lack genetic tools to identify elephant parasites. We present genetic markers from ribosomal DNA (rDNA) and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) to...

Data on personality for long-lived, highly social wild mammals with high cognitive abilities are rare. We investigated the personality structure of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) by using a large sample of semi-captive timber elephants in Myanmar. Data were collected during 2014-2017 using questionnaires, for which elephant riders (mahouts) rated 28 behavioural adjectives of elephants. Repea...