When the national focus is on the cow, it may seem unlikely that anyone would spend too much time looking closely at elephant dung. But a group of wildlife experts in West Bengal who did exactly that have stumbled upon an alarming discovery: elephants of north Bengal have been consuming plastic — and loads of it.
Until recently, the 168-km rail line between Alipurduar and the New Jalpaiguri railway station, where over 60 elephants were mowed down by trains between 2004 and 2015, was known for being a huge threat to elephants. In December 2018, while studying the Rethi-Moraghat elephant corridor in the region, experts from the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) and the north Bengal-based Society for Protecting Ophiofauna and Animal Rights (SPOAR) discovered another threat: plastic.
Experts were following elephant dung over an eight sq km area to understand the movement of elephants. What caught their eye was the presence of plastic in dung piles. “We were surprised to see carry bags, gutka packets, and empty packets of chips and biscuits in the dung,” said S.P. Pandey of SPOAR.
Upasana Ganguly of the WTI said there was a lot of human activity on the riverbed of the Rethi, which runs along the elephant corridor. “Sand-mining was taking place in the area, and we could see plastic litter,” she said. The elephant corridor, which links Gorumara National Park with Buxa Tiger Reserve, was crucial to elephant movement.
Harm from garbage
Raman Sukumar, professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, and an expert on elephants said elephants eat garbage and that is how plastics enter their system. “I have seen elephants feeding on garbage outside Bhubaneswar. The area where these dung piles were seen must have a group of elephants that had been feeding on garbage,” he said. Elephants are attracted to smelly rotten food and it is through this food that plastics get into their system, he added.
Dr. Sukumar said elephants derive a lot of energy from hind-gut fermentation, a kind of microbial fermentation, but he was not sure whether this process could assimilate plastic.
Wildlife enthusiasts and conservationists have pointed out that a number of rivers in north Bengal are filled up with plastic, and in the winter months, as these rivers turn dry, heaps of plastic remain on the river bed. In mid-2018, a scientist from Kolkata was alarmed to see plastics in the Torsa river in the Buxa Tiger Reserve. The Buxa Tiger Reserve sustains a large elephant population and the Torsa, which flows from Bhutan to India, is the main water source in the reserve.
