November 27, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Hiller trying to save elephants from extinction
by JEAN-BERNARD HYPPOLITE

Populations of elephants have been wiped out because of war-torn areas like Chad and Sudan. Many humans have also died in the process. To get the ivory, people will use a machine gun to break off elephant tusks; the elephants are left for dead. The population of elephants from one specific area dove from 14,000 to 1,000.

Springside School graduate Virginia Pearson is on a mission to save elephants from possible extinction.

“The trunk has 100,000 muscles,” Virginia said, adding that a “Bullet” elephant could shorten its elastic trunk like an accordion or simply lay it on the ground. Pearson knows that an elephant can move a telephone pole, pick up a dime or even remove a gold earring with ease. “It may be a little sloppy, though.” 

And that’s not even the half of it. Pearson has seen elephants do amazing tasks that not only show skills but intelligence as well. In American society elephants aren’t portrayed as the smartest beings, but Pearson’s extensive analysis has shown elephants to be “truly sentient beings … We are just now cracking, we think, the language that elephants communicate with,” said Virginia, who keeps in contact with fellow researchers  throughout the world via the International Elephant Foundation.  One of the projects that researchers are working on is the mapping of  elephants’ “special” memory. 

Believe it or not, Virginia has not yet seen an elephant in the wild. She’s only seen them within America and has learned what she knows through extensive research. Virginia links the world of elephants to the author Henry Beston’s The Outermost House, which includes the observation, “They are not brethren, they are other nations, caught with us in the trivial of the earth.”

“An elephant society is very similar to humans,” said Virginia, a resident of Chestnut Hill who went to Wellesley College, has three sons and one daughter and is a trustee of the Philadelphia Zoo.

“They can live the same life span that we do of  about 70 years. They are led in the wild by a matriarch who is usually the eldest in the group.    When there’s poaching and you take out the biggest, the oldest, you leave this group fragment with no leadership.” 

The matriarchs have spacial memory of where food and water is. Such knowledge is vital to the survival of the group. Virginia revealed that elephants communicate with a sub-human hearing ability.  Two-thirds of what they hear along with vocalizations are below the 20 hertz that humans hear.  Elephants also mourn their dead. When a close member of their group dies, they’ll stay with the body for up to three days. When one group of elephants comes across another unrelated group, they will spend a large amount of time picking up and examining bones, trying to make a connection.

Virginia has been developing a project with The National Geographic Society titled On-Board-The-Elephant. A video acoustic recording system will capture images and log data. Virginia hopes to get the instrument out in the wild, though at the present time, it’s a year away.

Virginia is seen with three elephants at the Nashville Zoo in Tennessee.

She hopes to attach the video acoustic recording system to the side or below a GPS, or the Global Positioning Satellite collar that is placed on an elephant in the wild. Virgina wants to see what paths they take, the selection of plants they eat and their vocalizations. The new technology will also enable images to be taken in dense areas such as the base of the Sahara Desert, Zaire and Congo, where they usually cannot get otherwise fragmented images. An example of this is in the country of Gabon where the elephant’s migratory path is skewed due to explosions caused by an oil-seeking China.  After the explosions no one can track the elephants’ trajectory. 

“I’m anxious to get this going,” said Virginia. One of the elephants Virginia is trying to track is the Pygmy elephant.  There are 1,000 of their kind left.

The reality is, there are not many left in the wild. Virginia’s mission is urgent. “The worldwide count for elephants at one time was 1,300,000. That included African and Asian elephants. The count now in 2008 is below 450,000,” said Virginia. 

On the entire Asian continent there are fewer than 35,000 Asian elephants; only 500 are left in all of China. Asian elephants cannot get from point A to point B, due to the fragmentation of their areas. Virginia and other researchers have identified this problem as the “Human Elephant Conflict.”  Elephants are not only getting killed, they’re getting separated, which interrupts gene flow. 

The horrific fact is that elephants are getting killed at a rapid pace because of the high price of ivory.  The first sale of stockpiled ivory since 1999 took place on Oct. 28 of this year. This has made Virginia and other researchers question whether ivory should ever be sold again. That could mean more poaching, especially since the price of ivory has risen dramatically. A country like Kenya with an established wildlife service, has poaching from the north that it is on the rise. Populations of elephants have been wiped out because of war-torn areas like Chad and Sudan. Many humans have also died in the process. To get the ivory, people will use a machine gun to break off elephant tusks; the elephants are left for dead. The population of elephants from one specific area dove from 14,000 to 1,000.

“We’re losing elephants. The mission and the urgency behind all of my work for all these years is just that, they are facing extinction,” said Virginia.

Virginia’s efforts to raise awareness for this conflict have led to the classroom as well. Virginia volunteers and works through the Howard Hughes-Princeton University Satellite Program to give students a chance at learning molecular biology.

The unique program is comprised of biology teachers who travel to Princeton for a two-week institute, where they’re taught lab techniques. Once that is over, teachers venture back to their own schools.  They have the choice of teaching if they have their own equipment. The expensive molecular biology equipment can now be borrowed by schools involved in the program. Springside is one of those schools. 

“With Springside, we’re the first site in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania at all, and this is the first workshop,” said Ms. Pearson, who clarified that Springside was in the third week of the four-week workshop. There was $20,000 worth of equipment in the room. Teachers sign up to get the equipment through Princeton for a two- to three-week lesson plan. Once everything is set in stone, students get to learn all of the DNA techniques. 

“What we’re hoping to do is not only to bring molecular biology to the High School level, but make budding scientists see a direction they can take once they get into college. They’re my mission. I’m a volunteer,” said Virginia. The workshops and training tie in to Virginia’s passion to translate technical science in order to show everyone the urgency of conservation, specifically towards elephants.

Elephants have been a part of Virginia’s life since birth. When Virginia was born, the birth announcement her mother sent out had an elephant on it. Dumbo is her favorite movie. As a kid she saw elephants in the circus. “What I’m working on at this point,” she explained, “is the elephant immune system and elephant diseases. That’s in conjunction and collaboration with colleagues at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington at the National Zoo and also at John Hopkins Medical School.” One of the diseases she is studying is the Probosciviruses, deadly to elephants in zoos and in the wild.  Virginia hopes to eventually have a national laboratory set up that is dedicated to studying the disease. 

Virginia’s been on her quest to save elephants since 1970 when she began working with zoos. She often gives a lecture called Elephants: Past, Present, Future? Virginia makes sure to show fallen elephant teeth to students. They’re usually in awe when Virginia puts a tooth in one of the students’ hands.

“This is what I’ll spend the rest of my life doing. Whatever gap I can fill, whatever people I can put together, whatever research, whatever I can learn that I don’t know, that’s what I’m gonna do.  That’s why I’m at Princeton learning all this. That’s why I’ve traveled all over the country,” said Virginia, who has visited every elephant she could find.

“They are living by voices we shall never hear. Living by extensions of the senses we either have lost or never retained. That’s what you’re seeing when you’re looking in the eye of an elephant,” said Virginia, who is in a race against time.