17 Apr 2008 - Kota Kinabalu,
Malaysia: The Borneo pygmy elephant may
not be native to Borneo after all. Instead,
the population could
be the last survivors of the Javan elephant
race – accidentally saved from extinction
by the Sultan of Sulu centuries ago, a new
publication suggests.
The origins of the pygmy
elephants, found in a range extending from
the north-east of the island into the Heart
of Borneo, have long been shrouded in mystery.
Their looks and behaviour differ from other
Asian elephants and scientists have questioned
why they never dispersed to other parts
of the island.
But a new paper published
today supports a long-held local belief
that the elephants were brought to Borneo
centuries ago by the Sultan of Sulu, now
in the Philippines, and later abandoned
in the jungle. The Sulu elephants, in turn,
are thought to have originated in Java.
Javan elephants became
extinct some time in the period after Europeans
arrived in South-East Asia. Elephants on
Sulu, never considered native to the island,
were hunted out in the 1800s.
“Elephants were shipped
from place to place across Asia many hundreds
of years ago, usually as gifts between rulers,”
said Mr Shim Phyau Soon, a retired Malaysian
forester whose ideas on the origins of the
elephants partly inspired the current research.
“It’s exciting to consider that the forest-dwelling
Borneo elephants may be the last vestiges
of a subspecies that went extinct on its
native Java Island, in Indonesia, centuries
ago.”
If the Borneo pygmy
elephants are in fact elephants from Java,
an island more than 1,200 km (800 miles)
south of their current range, it could be
the first known elephant translocation in
history that has survived to modern times,
providing scientists with critical data
from a centuries-long experiment.
Scientists solved part
of the mystery in 2003, when DNA testing
by Columbia University and WWF ruled out
the possibility that the Borneo elephants
were from Sumatra or mainland Asia, where
the other Asian subspecies are found, leaving
either Borneo or Java as the most probable
source.
The new paper, “Origins
of the Elephants Elephas Maximus L. of Borneo,”
published in this month’s Sarawak Museum
Journal shows that there is no archaeological
evidence of a long-term elephant presence
on Borneo.
“Just one fertile female
and one fertile male elephant, if left undisturbed
in enough good habitat, could in theory
end up as a population of 2,000 elephants
within less than 300 years,” said Junaidi
Payne of WWF, one of the paper’s co-authors.
“And that may be what happened in practice
here.”
There are perhaps just
1,000 of the elephants in the wild, mostly
in the Malaysian state of Sabah. WWF satellite
tracking has shown they prefer the same
lowland habitat that is being increasingly
cleared for timber rubber and palm oil plantations.
Their possible origins in Java make them
even more a conservation priority.
“If they came from Java,
this fascinating story demonstrates the
value of efforts to save even small populations
of certain species, often thought to be
doomed,” said Dr Christy Williams, coordinator
of WWF’s Asian elephant and rhino programme.
“It gives us the courage to propose such
undertakings with the small remaining populations
of critically endangered Sumatran rhinos
and Javan rhinos, by translocating a few
to better habitats to increase their numbers.
It has worked for Africa’s southern white
rhinos and Indian rhinos, and now we have
seen it may have worked for the Javan elephant,
too.”
