Bad News For Elephants: Slow Reproduction Rate Does Not Improve Population

Elephants are known for their gentle nature and impeccable memory. However, these gentle giants own amazing ivory tusks that make them target to poachers and hunters when left in the wild. With their 22-month gestation period, it takes a while for them to maintain their population, let alone increase them

Africa's elephants are among those that are widely loved, but even more widely endangered. According to The New York Times, poachers managed to kill off 30 percent of the savanna elephants in the years 2007 to 2014, and population is now declining at a rate of around eight percent a year.

Forest elephants, a diminutive species only recently recognized as distinct, live in central and western jungles, and they are already shown to be struggling as much as their savanna cousins - so much so that illegal killings of these forests elephants depleted their numbers by 62 percent in the years 2002 to 2013.

Unfortunately for these elephants - no matter the species, their population will not be rebounding anytime soon. As it is commonly known, elephants have the longest gestation period of all mammals. Live Science noted that it is about 640 to 660 days or 95 weeks (that's nearly two years). Scientists also found that the forest elephants, unlike other species, start reproducing at the age of 23 and only at a 5-year- interval. Elephants should live for 60 to 70 years, but they only have about four offspring in their entire lifetime. This means that even if all the poaching can be stopped immediately, it will take another 90 years before the elephant populations return to the pre-2002 numbers.

George Wittemyer, and ecologist from the Colorado State University and an author of the study said, "We already knew about the scale and severity of poaching, but what was not known before was the long-term ramifications of that poaching." He also added that the study showed that things are actually worse than expected for elephants, especially in terms of how fast they can rebound.