How to Stop a Marauding Elephant

For years, villagers across India and Africa have sought ways to keep marauding, hungry elephants away from their crops. The effort has inspired plenty of creativity: draped fences made out of string frst dipped in chili-infused grease (elephants don't like chili peppers), for example, or elaborate cowbell systems and trigger wires to warn when the intruders arrive.

Trying to defend your family's crops is a dangerous, exhausting activity. During the harvest season in Kenya, farmers are forced to guard their fields at night with the aid of small fires: when an elephant arrives, the farmers leap up with flaming sticks, and cue their children to start banging pots and pans.

But if the elephants aren't dissuaded, loss of food and income is devastating (this month, when a troop of 12 elephants raided a series of villages in Uganda, its residents were left vulnerable to food shortages). Every year, the Kenyan government records some 1,300 complaints about elephant-human contact. "Even if it's once every ten years that their entire field is wiped out, [farmers'] children will go hungry," says James Deutsch, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Africa Program.

Now, though, scientists have discovered that the solution to keeping elephants at bay might lie in an unexpected, winged nemesis: the bee. It turns out that for all their thick grey hides, elephants don't like getting stung more than anyone else — in fact, hearing a mere snatch of a bee's threatening hum is enough to literally cause an elephant to flee, emitting low-frequency alarm calls to warn its compatriots away all the while.

According to Lucy King, the animal researcher who recently published these finding in a journal of the Public Library of Science, villagers could use this fact to their advantage. For example, instead of huddling all night by the fire, farmers could construct "bee fences" by dangling beehives off poles, which would be wired to each other at strategic intervals around a field. When an elephant blundered into the wire, the polls would shake, disturbing the bees and the elephants in turn.

As King says, "It's impossible to cover Africa in electric fences...The infrastructure doesn't exist in many places and it would restrict animals' movement. This could be a better way to direct elephants away from farmers' crops." At least, anyway, until researchers start investigating ways to lasso elephants' more notorious fear of, say, field mice.

Photo Credit: exfordy