A new study reveals how African elephants plan their elaborate journeys: they strategically choose the least energy-consuming routes to reach food sources. These findings, researchers say, can help conservationists design elephant corridors to connect fragmented habitats.

African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana), considered endangered, can travel vast distances for water, food or mates. Some landscapes they inhabit have extensive plains. Others, like the semiarid savannas of Samburu county in northern Kenya, are interspersed with towering mountain peaks.

The study’s authors wanted to understand how elephants expend energy moving through a region. So they developed an energy landscape model that combined 22 years of elephant satellite tracking data from Samburu, collected by the charity Save the Elephants, with information on topography, vegetation density and water availability.

Analysis of 157 GPS-collared elephants revealed the massive mammals tend to choose areas with lower movement costs: 93% preferred areas rich in forage, and 94% avoided steep terrain.

“What we found, in effect, is that the elephants tend to not like going uphill,” Fritz Vollrath, study co-author from the University of Oxford, U.K., told Mongabay.

Elephants get very little energy from their “vegan” diet, he said. “If a bull has to lift its 5-ton body for 200 meters [over steep terrain], that’ll cost him about an hour of foraging.”

Carel Verhoef, a human-elephant conflict management specialist who works in Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique but wasn’t involved in the study, cautioned that mountainous terrain isn’t always a barrier. In some regions where people and elephants don’t coexist amicably, it serves as a refuge for elephants.

“Where we work elephants tend to ‘head for the hills’ when under stress especially during [the] daytime just because they regard hilly areas — with tree cover — as safe zones in populated dual-use areas,” he said.

Verhoef added the need for water can override an elephant’s instinct to avoid steep terrain. “Elephants will walk anywhere to get to water so the primary drivers [such as thirst] would be stronger than the instinct to preserve energy.”

The Samburu study found that elephants’ preference to be near or far from water varied greatly among individuals. Vollrath acknowledged their model may have missed water sources that the elephants were discreetly using, such as unmapped reservoirs or pipes that they’d broken.

But he said their paper lays out a new modeling method to analyze elephants’ use of a landscape based on energy costs and other factors. This can help conservationists strategically design dispersal corridors for the herbivores and guide the creation of nature reserves in regions rich in elephants but devoid of economic prospects.

“This is where [energy landscape modeling] gets interesting: you can make predictions [about] which would be a good [wildlife] corridor, and which would be a good park, because it will allow the elephants to move,” Vollrath said.

Banner image: Elephants crossing Ewaso Ewaso Ng’iro River, Samburu, Kenya. Image courtesy of Fritz Vollrath.