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Extinct Javan elephants may have been rediscovered – in Borneo18/04/2008 15:08:47
Extinct Javan elephants may have been rediscovered – in Borneo April 2008: The Borneo pygmy elephant may not be native to Borneo after all. Instead, the population could be the last survivors of the Javan elephant race – accidentally saved from extinction by the Sultan of Sulu centuries ago, a new publication suggests. But a new paper published today supports a long-held local belief that the elephants were brought to Borneo centuries ago by the Sultan of Sulu, (part of the Philippines), and later abandoned in the jungle. The Sulu elephants, in turn, are thought to have originated in Java. Javan Elephants Javan elephants became extinct some time in the period after Europeans arrived in South-East Asia. Elephants on Sulu, never considered native to the island, were hunted out in the 1800s. ‘Elephants were shipped from place to place across Asia many hundreds of years ago, usually as gifts between rulers,’ said Mr Shim Phyau Soon, a retired Malaysian forester whose ideas on the origins of the elephants partly inspired the current research. ‘It’s exciting to consider that the forest-dwelling Borneo elephants may be the last vestiges of a subspecies that went extinct on its native Java Island, in Indonesia, centuries ago.’ Borneo Elephants
First Known Elephant Translocation If the Borneo pygmy elephants are in fact elephants from Java, an island more than 1,200 km (800 miles) south of their current range, it could be the first known elephant translocation in history that has survived to modern times, providing scientists with critical data from a centuries-long experiment. Scientists solved part of the mystery in 2003, when DNA testing by Columbia University and WWF ruled out the possibility that the Borneo elephants were from Sumatra or mainland Asia, where the other Asian subspecies are found, leaving either Borneo or Java as the most probable source. The new paper, ‘Origins of the Elephants Elephas Maximus L. of Borneo,’ published in this month’s Sarawak Museum Journal shows that there is no archaeological evidence of a long-term elephant presence on Borneo. One Couple Could Produce 2000 Elephants in 300 Years ‘Just one fertile female and one fertile male elephant, if left undisturbed in enough good habitat, could in theory end up as a population of 2,000 elephants within less than 300 years,’ said Junaidi Payne of WWF, one of the paper’s co-authors. ‘And that may be what happened in practice here.’  There are perhaps just 1,000 of the elephants in the wild, mostly in the Malaysian state of Sabah. WWF satellite tracking has shown they prefer the same lowland habitat that is being increasingly cleared for timber rubber and palm oil plantations. Their possible origins in Java make them even more a conservation priority. ‘If they came from Java, this fascinating story demonstrates the value of efforts to save even small populations of certain species, often thought to be doomed,’ said Dr Christy Williams, coordinator of WWF’s Asian elephant and rhino programme. ‘It gives us the courage to propose such undertakings with the small remaining populations of critically endangered Sumatran rhinos and Javan rhinos, by translocating a few to better habitats to increase their numbers. It has worked for Africa’s southern white rhinos and Indian rhinos, and now we have seen it may have worked for the Javan elephant, too.’
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