A viral video of an elephant scavenging through plastic waste in Karnataka’s MM Hills is not an isolated incident — it’s part of a documented pattern that has already killed at least one elephant this year, and the same habituation behind it carries a slower, less visible risk to people too.
asian elephants
Regional Indian films about wildlife carry a specificity that mainstream Bollywood struggles to match. From Tamil Nadu’s forest rangers to Kerala’s contested buffer zones and the streaming era’s new ambitions.
A failure to conduct a thorough probe of different strains of Herpes virus in elephants may rob Kerala’s forests of all baby elephants, warns a state forest department veterinarian.
The herpes virus that killed 26 elephants over the past 10 years, mostly young ones, both in the wild and captive, had different strains depending on the region they were in like Munnar, Wayanad and Nilambur, the Times of India reports.
In a paper titled `Impact of diseases in wildlife conservation’ at the sixth international conference on NextGen Genomics, Biology , Bioinformatics and Technologies (NGBT) in Kochi, veterinarian Arun Zachariah said that this information came when a full DNA sequencing of the virus found in the elephants was done and analysed. “We are now doing a detailed analysis of the genetic profile of the virus,” he added.
He said the animals died within 48 hours of contracting the virus. “We spent several days monitoring the animals in the wild and realized that the virus was oozing out in the trunk leaks of adult elephants which infected the young ones in the herd. We are trying to understand the relation between the three parameters, pathogen (virus), host (elephants) and environment (climate), and what is the causative trigger,” he said.