Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2024
By virtue of sheer size, elephants are ecosystem engineers like no other. This chapter explores their interactions with plants, parasites and commensals, natural resources, and anthropogenic elements. As always, the versatility and adaptability of elephants originates with an understanding of their dietary breadth, from the Siberian steppes to the Southeast Asian rain forests. Aside from their obvious relationships with their forage and ecological roles as consumers and seed dispersers, elephants themselves act as hosts to other species. Some may depend on elephants as much as their food plants, while others represent new perturbations in the novel environments and opportunities presented by a warming world. The physical activities of elephants contribute to nutrient cycling, while their need for particular earth and soil features remains little understood. The ultimate dietary supplementation derives from resources willingly or unwillingly supplied by humans, to which elephants and other wildlife are increasingly exposed. The “landscape of fear” provides one means of studying how elephants may be responding to human activities and presence.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.