UF researcher Todd Palmer co-authored a study based on a 15-year environmental experiment. The experiment, designed to study the potential effects of selective extinction, showed that elephants are a keystone species. The removal of elephants from the environment led to a 67% reduction in dung beetles.
The smaller beetle population had a ripple effect, leading to slower decomposition and reduced seed dispersal. “Elephants are charismatic and there is lots of focus on their conservation, but primarily for their own sake,” Palmer said. “This paper adds a new argument, showing that elephants are infrastructural. Their dung subsidizes an entire community of insects that collectively perform services worth billions of dollars annually.”
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