Pachyderm and petrichor: Searching for new ways to mitigate the human-elephant conflict

Abstract

Geosmin, a taste and odor (T & O) compound that has been hypothesized to occur in higher magnitudes in water bodies due to climate change, is a water quality parameter for human consumption, but an olfactory cue for elephants to migrate towards water holes. It is proposed here to culture bacteria capable of geosmin biodegradation for the development of a unitary, or a consortium of microbes, to lower the geosmin content in human settlement-proximal water holes, to discourage the encroachment of elephants to villages.This novel idea aims to protect both, the elephant population and the human footprint in harm’s way, furnishing a program to conserve elephants while ensuring that human lives are protected. The environmental and social impacts of this proposed nature-based solution will be centered on 1. Elephant conservation 2. Reduction of incidences of the human-elephant conflict, which together provide a natural solution to a dilemma that so far has lacked tangible, sustainable, and long-term, bio-centric remedies.This editorial projects to protect both humans and elephants in a climate-change-impacted dry zone of Sri Lanka, where there are an estimated >5000-6000 elephants, which makes up 10% of the Asian elephant population in 2% of the range, the highest density of Asian elephants in any country. In an increasingly water-impoverished landscape, encroaching on human settlements for water and food flares up the human-elephant conflict that claims hundreds of lives across the human-animal divide, in any given year.There is a quote by arguably the greatest artist that walked on this earth, Pablo Picasso, who coined this wonderful line “God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things”. We scientists too need to be like artists – “try other things” to save the opulence of biodiversity – those giraffes, pachyderms and big cats, threatened by habitat expansion and human encroachment, of which the elephant holds the pinnacle rung. This editorial is simply a wake-up call for the scientific community to try other things.