African Science News
Written by Henry Niondo
Saturday, 13 June 2009

An unusual number of wildlife, including 37 elephants mostly between 2 and 8 years old, have died in Kenya’s Laikipia/Samburu ecosystem due to the prolonged dry season. A few mature ones have also died as a result of the drought.

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A team of Kenya Wildlife Service vets carried out postmortems on the dead elephants, and collected samples from live ones for further laboratory analysis to determine the causes of death.

Preliminary results indicate that elephants are dying of malnutrition due to an extremely low food biomass, caused by the prolonged drought.

The younger elephants are the most affected because they cannot walk for long distances in search of food.

Further investigations are being carried out to determine the possibility of opportunistic disease out break due to lowered immune levels as a result of poor diet. KWS is monitoring the situation and a team of experts is on the ground for active disease search.

This area annually experiences dry spells in the months of March, April and May when other parts of the country are having rains. In 2007 a total of 14 elephants died naturally while we lost 28 in the same period in 2008.

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