Elephants Might Have a Big Carbon Footprint

In 1967, South Africa’s National Parks Board made a fateful decision: The elephant population in Kruger National Park, which had been rising steeply, should stay stable in order to preserve the other species living there. Each year, wildlife managers would choose a number of elephants to cull—usually somewhere from 350 to 500. The animals were shot, their carcasses necropsied, and their meat salted and dried for food.

After international uproar and a change in management practices that separated the park into , Kruger stopped culling elephants in 1994. As a result, the park’s elephant numbers swelled from more than 7,800 to 12,500 in about a decade, and its landscape changed dramatically. More elephants dispersed seeds across the park, giving life to more types of plants. They used their tusks to dig for water in the dry season, creating water holes used by many species. And most of all, they knocked from the atmosphere, and started producing excess carbon instead.