11 September 2010, 12:00 p.m.

Researchers in Kenya have found that it is not mice, as the urban legend holds, but the prospect of getting ants in their trunks that will put elephants off even the tastiest morsels of food.

Scientists in Kenya have published the findings of breakthrough research that can help nature conservation to create an eco-friendly way to protect trees against the devastation caused by large herds of elephant.

 

The research can be of particular importance in Africa’s national parks where large herds of elephants create headaches with their destructive eating patterns.

 

In an article published this month in the journal Current Biology, Jacob Goheen and Todd Palmer from Kenya’s Mphala Research Centre found that dominant whistling thorn acacia trees in the savannahs of Kenya protect themselves against the devastation often caused by large herds of elephants by creating a symbiotic relationship with ants. The tree provides the insects with a safe home and food.

 

In further tests the scientists discovered that elephants will not eat anything covered with ants – not even their favorite plants and leaves.

 

Their curiosity was triggered by the phenomena of whistling thorn acacia forests that seemed to be able to hold their own even in the heart of elephant country.

 

In a further experiment they tried to protect parts of the Kenya’s Laikapa plateau against elephant-damage by fencing it off with an electric fence. The Laikapa plateau were chosen for the project as the elephant population here had increased quite significantly between 1992 and 2002.

 

When they returned, they found that whistling-thorn acacia tree cover had remained the same both inside and outside of the electric fences. To test their theory that there was nothing in the plant itself that elephants did not like, but that it was indeed the presence of ants that kept them away, Goheen and Palmer then removed the ants from hundreds of acacia trees. After a year they returned to find that the trees without ants were damaged far more than those with active ant populations.