AsiaLIFE

How do you find elephant dung in an area of two million hectares? Do they like spicy food? These and other questions about elephants you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask, Johan Smits poses to Matt Maltby, the Elephant Man.

“I didn’t want to get stuck in a lab,” says Matt Maltby of his decision to leave the U.K. after graduating in Biological Sciences. Instead, he got stuck in a Cambodian forest in Koh Kong for one year, sleeping in a hammock between two trees and catching all kinds of unsavoury diseases. “I got tropical infections on my leg, trench foot with no skin on my feet, and I caught typhoid, typhus, but never malaria,” he says, not without a certain flair for nostalgia. He was conducting biological surveys then. Nowadays Matt can be found in a new habitat, the concrete jungle of Phnom Penh, where he works with Fauna and Flora International (FFI) as Project Advisor for the Cambodian Elephant Conservation Group.

“It seems each survey we do turns up new findings and surprises, either species we didn’t expect to find or, in some cases, totally new species, particularly reptiles and amphibians,” Matt says. At twenty-seven, he thinks Cambodia is a great place to start a career. “I have gained a huge variety of skills through the work, from fixing boats and motorbikes in the field to cooperating with the government and local communities, to working in such a developing science as wildlife DNA research.”

It’s All in the Dung

Due to its dense wilderness, Cambodia is also more challenging than Africa where Matt was working before coming here. “In Africa you can just fly over with a helicopter to count elephants – here this is impossible as they are hidden in the jungle and extremely hard to spot,” he explains. “I’ve never seen an elephant in the wild in Cambodia.” That’s where the DNA research comes in. By collecting samples from elephant dung, all kinds of data can be extracted, such as the minimum number of elephants, inter-breeding between herds, how they move around, and the number of males and females in a herd.

“In one national park in India they had a thousand elephants but only five males, because of poaching, so that posed a big problem for breeding,” he says. Finding elephant dung in an area as vast as the Cardamom Mountains is both simple and logical. “We only go where we think there might be elephants,” he says. To get this information they interview local people and gradually build up a database. “We map the distribution within the Cardamoms,” he explains. “Some move here and there, some just stay in one area. It’s a very complicated dynamic.” When the dry season comes, the surveying goes full throttle. As there is less water, the elephants stay close to watery holes and fruit trees. “We call these hotspots,” Matt says. “The area is too big to search it all.”

Trust, Not Force

It’s not only the elephants that need attention. They often destroy farmers’ crops, which creates a lot of conflict with the local villagers. “We help the farmers grow different crops that elephants don’t like, chilli for example, that create a good cash benefit, so they can grow four or five different crops and in the end have a more stable cash flow,” he says. Thanks to maximising their yield, the farmers can then make more profit without having to expand their farm land by encroaching on the wilderness habitat, or supplementing their income in the dry season by cutting wood in the forest to make charcoal.

Creating trust is the most important, but also the hardest, element to make this work. It can take two years to build a relationship with one village, according to Matt. “When we work with them we tell them, ‘we have the contract here. You have to agree now not to cut any more forest and to grow these crops instead’,” he says. He throws in an example of a man who walked into their meeting with the villagers, heard about what they were doing, went home and smashed his charcoal kiln, committing to growing crops instead. “If you just do law enforcement it creates a lot of tension and fighting. To see that guy go home and do it himself is amazing.”

Good Job

According to Matt, the costs of DNA analysis are coming down every year. He sees it as a new but important tool in wildlife research, not just for the monitoring of elephants, but for many other elusive and endangered species such as tigers and Siamese crocodiles. In order to prepare handing over the DNA analysis to Cambodians in the future, FFI last month started the first DNA training to Khmer students as part of their master’s course in biodiversity conservation. The only one that exists in the Kingdom. “Before we just sent the samples off overseas, but hopefully in the future we can do it here,” Matt says. Job prospects are pretty good for those who take the course, mostly with the environmental NGOs. Many are well paid. “There are so many students who study business and economics, but our graduates can all find good jobs,” says Matt. “I think it’s looking good for the future of the Cambodian management of wildlife.”

At the time of going to press, FFI were expecting DNA results to come in soon from Australia. However, Matt says he’s seeing signs that the elephant population in Cambodia is stabilising or even increasing.

For information on FFI, visit www.fauna-flora.org/asiapacific.php