We are all familiar with the elephants, but if you ever looked into them before the 2000s, you would learn that there was only two different elephant species alive. However, during the last few decades this belief has slowly changed, and the general consensus is that there are currently three different species - two in Africa and one in Asia.
Asian elephants (Elephas maximus). Image by Mohan Raj, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
The Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) is the only one that is found in Asia, and has three different subspecies (one for Sri Lanka, one for Sumatra, and one for mainland Asia such as China, India and more). This is the only elephant in the genus Elephas, and all the other members of this genus has died out a long time ago.
The other two species of elephants are found in Africa, and this is where the debate has been going. Up until recently it was believed that there was only one species in Africa, but most scientists have now agreed to separate them into the African bush elephant / African savannah elephant (Loxodonta africana), and the African forest elephant (L. cyclotis).
An African forest elephant (L. cyclotis) mother with a calf. Image by Thomas Breuer, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.
Not everyone has recognized the two African elephant species
The problem with finding out that there are actually two species of elephant is that not everyone accepted the discovery. There are still some groups, including government groups, that do not want to separate them into two different species, and rather treats them as two subspecies.
While this might not mean much to most of us, it can have huge implications on the conservation efforts for the elephants. While the African savannah elephant is only considered Vulnerable by the IUCN Red List, the African forest elephant is most likely very close to reaching dangerously low levels of the population. It has not yet gotten an assessment by the IUCN Red List, so the official status is not declared, but no one doubts that it is highly threatened.
A male African bush elephant. Image by Bernard DUPONT, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
This means that being its own species could potentially increase the funding and protection for the African forest elephant, which it sorely need!
How genetics separates the African elephant species
In 2017, a group of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany did a study about the genetics of the elephants, and they found out that the African forest elephant is more closely related to the extinct straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) than it is to the bush/savannah elephant. This really shook up the commonly accepted knowledge about the elephants, and scientists had to reevaluate a lot of the knowledge they had about elephant taxonomy.
To summarize it very quickly; the two African elephants were much more distantly related than anyone had anticipated, and they had in fact been two separate species since they separated from each other 2 - 7 million years ago.
More recently, a new study has looked closer at the genes from 14 different elephants; 6 from living elephant species and 8 from extinct elephants, mammoths and mastodons in order to get a bigger picture of how the elephant species are related to each other.
A Wooly mammoth (left) and an American mastodon (right) – two of the species that were used to compare the genome of the elephants against. Image by Dantheman9758 at the English language Wikipedia, posted with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
This new paper is pretty much confirming what scientists have believed recently; that there are three different extant species of elephants. Hopefully this new evidence will be enough to persuade even the rest of the people who claims that the African elephants are the same species once and for all!
The research paper also points out something really interesting regarding gene flow, and that is that most of these closely related animals have interbred at one point. The two extant African elephants are fully able to interbreed, which is why many people want them to be classified as one species, but genetic results show that they are more than unique enough to be two different species.
In addition to this, the paper goes a long way to increase the knowledge of elephant phylogeny, the study of how the different species are evolutionary related to each other. It it obviously a very difficult task to learn much about this due to the fact that we only have a few remaining elephant species, while most are extinct a long time ago, and therefore usually only gives us fragmented DNA to work with.
Thanks for reading
I hope we can all agree that there are three living elephant species by now! Anyway, thanks for checking out the post. I hope you enjoyed it, and maybe even learned something new about the taxonomy of elephants.
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