Eight thousand kilometres of aerial surveys of eight reserves is the easy
bit: Sam is also fitting 29 elephants with satellite collars, which is a tricky
manoeuvre to say the least.
Ecologists are the one group of people that utilise statistics very much, particularly when they deal with large scale ecological problems.
Coming to the Department of Statistics is interested in such a problem in Africa, largely because people utilise resources on a very large scale, in some instances, and they do it particularly in the way they use their livestock in the region.
Now, invariably when you are sharing the environment with a large animal as the elephant you come in conflict with it, so it would be very nice to know how many elephants are around in the first place, and of course statistics can help you with that, but also very nice if you know how many large and small ones are around because you can then tell how the population is changing. But perhaps the thing that is most significant is finding out where elephants go because that will tell you whether you are going to be in conflict with it or not if you are living in a particular landscape.
Now to do that we need to go and use some high-tech technology.
In particular we make use of satellite transmitters, and the only way you can get that onto an elephant is to get in a helicopter and dart it with a drug.
Now here the vet is busy preparing the drug, which is M99. It is applied via an air gun from the air, and the drug needs an antidote. You're not going to get a surprise with the elephant going to wake up on you before you really wanting it to.
So the vet prepares the antidote, and eventually they take off to go look for elephants. The rest of the team is anxiously waiting on the ground to get a message that the elephant is down. Some are more anxious than others.
Eventually the message comes down the elephant is down. The team runs is. This often has to happen pretty quickly. They have somebody around to protect it in case there are some other elephants around, but you do occasionally get elephants that are fallen down badly. Eventually the team will get it over.
Once you've got the elephant down, a lot of the onus rests on the vet to make sure that the elephant is actually comfortable, like for instance making sure that the trunk is spread out, that the elephant can actually breathe properly.
The rest of the team keep going to put a satellite transmitter or collar around its neck, and then it's always a number of measurements that need to happen. One of the key measurements is actually the shoulder height of the elephant, because from that you can estimate the age rather accurately, based on some models that we have developed relatively recently. And of course the data collection is sort of the beginning point of any statistician's sort of work and noting whatever you have measured is rather important.
Now while this is all going on the fellows who are responsible for putting the collar on are busy with that work. The collar contains a transmitter which is connected to a battery pack and the whole package weighs about 13 kilograms, but to ensure that the transmitter stays on the top of the elephant they attach a weight at the bottom that swings the collar upright whenever needed.
While these guys are busy it gives the opportunity also to have a look at any sort of injuries that the elephant may have, for instance gunshot wounds and such things. And of course when something like that is around it also can give the vet opportunity to treat it and make some notes about other particular sorts of diseases and so-forth that it sees around.
Now the collar needs to get shaped up a bit once it is properly fixed. It is fixed with bolts and nuts, and the excess bolt is cut off and the guys flatten that particular cutoff bolt so it doesn't hurt the elephant, and the same goes for the excess belting, that gets cut off.
Eventually when that is all fixed the vet will inject the elephant with an antidote. After everybody has cleared out, the vet makes sure everything is fine. It takes roughly about two minutes for the antidote to start operating. By that time everybody is at a relatively safe distance from it, just making sure that the elephant is getting up properly.
As you can see, very healthy, very quick. She gets up, has a bit of a sniff at her new necklace, slowly turns around, and take off. And the collar is busy working, giving information to us about spatial use, what elephants are doing in the landscape.
