One Hundred Elephants Die After Watering Holes Dry Up

A hundred elephants have died due to a lack of water amid severe drought in Africa.

Elephants living in Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park have suffered as seasonal, summer rainfall continues to be over a month late. Watering holes have turned into nothing more than muddy puddles, according to a release from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

The national park is home to around 45,000 elephants but the IFAW reports that "at least" 100 have died by now. And, the situation could worsen if the rains do not come soon.

It is not the first time elephants have suffered due to lack of rainfall—in 2019, 200 elephants died for the same reason.

"It is one of the most serious immediate and ongoing threats to African elephants. Elephants are entirely dependent on surface water for survival," Rachael Gross, a postdoctoral fellow at the Fenner School of Environment & Society at the Australian National University, told Newsweek.

"They have biophysical restrictions, such as an inability to sweat through thick, impermeable skin and having a big body that creates a lot heat, that mean they can't offload the heat that accumulates in their body like most mammals. To make up for this, they drink a lot of water and will spray water and mud on their body to imitate sweating. If they can't access that water, they rapidly dehydrate and overheat at the same time which causes a long and painful death."

Experts have put the lack of rainfall down to the El Niño weather pattern. During an El Niño year, the ocean becomes unusually warm in the Equatorial Pacific. Effects from this depend on the area, but it causes drier than usual conditions in southern Africa, meaning water is more scarce than usual.

"In eastern and southern Africa, we have already seen 20+ years of increasingly severe drought and all climate predications point to this trend continuing and worsening," Gross, who is currently researching African savannah elephants and how climate change affects them, said. "While elephants can move upwards of 80 km per day in search of water, this is not sustainable and we see them moving outside of protected areas and interacting more with local communities which increases the chance of human-elephant conflict."

These dry conditions could also be a knock on effect from climate change, which has been reducing important resources for wildlife around the world in recent years.

"Elephants and other wildlife species will face a crisis if the rains don't come soon," says Phillip Kuvawoga, a landscape program director of IFAW, said in statement.

African elephants are an endangered species, meaning these continued deaths could be devastating for the population. According to Kuvawoga, there are other knock on effects from these mass deaths.

"Wild animals protect the carbon already stored in nature, prevent it from being released into the atmosphere, and help nature soak up and store even more carbon," he said. "The anticipated deaths of elephants and other species, such as we are seeing in Zimbabwe right now, must be seen as a symptom of deep-seated and complex challenges affecting the region's natural resources conservation, aggravated by climate change."

These elephants usually rely on the 104 boreholes in the national park, which are solar powered. However, these boreholes rely on water from rainfall and park authorities claim it is "no match for the extreme temperatures."

Zimbabwe is not the only country affected by dry weather. Between 2018 and 2023, thousands of animals died in the Horn of Africa, which has suffered at the hands of a drought for years.

"The domino effect of climate change extends beyond immediate death, such as causing the death of 200 elephants in Botswana as a result of unseasonable warmth causing a cyanobacterial bloom and poisoning them," Gross said. "Higher temperatures also make elephants more susceptible to zoonotic diseases like Foot and Mouth disease. This reliance on water and inability to offload heat affects the entire elephant population, and these trickle down effects in combination with the deaths in places like Hwange pose a very serious threat to the survival of elephants."

This is also having a negative impact on humans living in these countries. As resources become scarce, wildlife and humans are having to compete for them.

For those living in rural communities, elephants may wander into villages in search of food and water that they cannot find in their own habitat.

"Authorities are largely doing the most they can given the restrictions in physical capabilities, funding and spatial planning," Gross said. "They are in an incredibly difficult situation managing both elephants, other priority species and distressed landscapes while balancing tourism, research and conservation.

"Providing artificial water, designing drought tolerant plant-scapes and monitoring elephant populations are all useful but short-term and small-scale solutions to an increasingly serious problem. The solution is difficult, uncomfortable and long term and requires a shift in the philosophy and ethics of conservation to be decolonial."

Update, 12/18/23, 7 a.m. ET: This article has been updated to include quotes from Rachael Gross.

Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about elephants? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.