Elephants need smart people!

Size removes some threats to survival, never all. Not many animals dare interfere with the elephant in habitat, but bacteria and bullets impact everywhere. Size becomes a disadvantage when drought brings famine. And size no longer solves any problems when living space is curbed by fences.

But size is only one variable. The vital parameters of life are unique for every species. Their favourable and unfavourable values are the vicissitudes of life to be faced, to overcome or to succumb. The good times roll in and out for all. Most species that ever lived are already extinct.

In interactive systems your resource species have to prosper. Every species has many features for use in mutually beneficial transactions with its neighbours. Its living alliances determine its hold on survival. Every small shift in ecological transactions change a parameter value affecting not just one player. The ripple effects are felt unexpectedly in unforeseen places.

Thus the disappearance of just one species impacts on the remaining ones of its world. This may cause chain reactions to countless spots, disturbing comfort zones and harmonies as disruption or just change spreads. Such effects may be positive, but dont count on it! And no ecology is static; something new is always appearing, while something else is disappearing, sometimes forever. Ones resources may move elsewhere, prefer new alliances or evolve new needs; a bit like divorce. Poking a finger into the workings of nature anywhere on this earth may be more detrimental than we have thought. Yet we do it continually, often without a thought as to repercussions.

In our time some systems that have developed over millennia are being changed at an alarming rate. Species may have little time to adapt. For coming generations to keep seeing elephants, requires people to care for much more than their favourite few species (KZN Rhino Club Newsletter, Aug. 2014).