Gorongosa is one of Africa’s great recovering ecosystems — a vast, species-rich landscape where forests, floodplains, and savannas are returning to life after war. Between 2011 and 2019 ElephantVoices worked with the Gorongosa Restoration Project to follow a traumatized but rebounding elephant population, documenting how civil conflict reshaped their bodies, behavior, and trust in humans. Our long-term research tracks their slow return to safety, space, and stability — offering a powerful story of resilience, evolution, and hope.
In 2011, the Gorongosa Restoration Project (GRP) invited ElephantVoices to assess the park’s elephant population and to initiate a long-term monitoring and conservation project. In October 2012, we began studying the Gorongosa elephants in earnest, returning to Mozambique for fieldwork for one to two months each year through 2019. (Want to find Gorongosa on the map?) Back in 1969, Gorongosa National Park was home to over 2,200 elephants. Between 1977 and 1992, civil conflict in Mozambique took the lives of most of them. Elephant meat fed soldiers, and ivory was sold to buy arms and ammunition. By the time peace was restored, fewer than 200 elephants were thought to remain. Thanks to intervention by the Mozambican Government and the GRP, by the end of our study we estimate there to be over 800 elephants in Gorongosa, and their numbers were gradually increasing. Yet, the survivors hadn’t forgotten their gruesome experiences. They were still wary of people and they continued to avoid large areas of the national park.
In 2011, the Gorongosa Restoration Project (GRP) invited ElephantVoices to initiate a long-term elephant monitoring and conservation project.
Our work aimed to document the status of the Gorongosa elephants; to understand the lasting physical and behavioral scars inflicted by the civil war; and to provide scientific data and build local capacity to ensure the strategic protection, management, and recovery of the population.
Our vision was a Gorongosa National Park in which elephants are secure — and feel secure — and in which elephants and surrounding human communities coexist in harmony. We visited Gorongosa to study the elephants for one to two months each year from 2011 through 2019.
We used still and video cameras to document individual elephants and their behavior. Images of each group formed the basis for individual identification and for populating the Gorongosa elephant databases. Strategically placed, these trail cameras also helped us collect data on elephants living in areas difficult to access due to thick forest or limited roads. These trail cameras allowed us to identify individuals we might otherwise never have encountered and provided continuous data in key areas — for example, where elephants crossed park boundaries.
In addition, we used still and video imagery to document specific behaviors as part of our long-term study of the behavioral repertoire of African elephants. Much of this work is now represented in The Elephant Ethogram: A Library of African Elephant Behavior.
Adult female elephant, Corajosa, with family members.
By the end of our study in 2019, we had documented 28 elephant families belonging to two clans, which we named the Urema and Pungue Clans. In addition, we identified about 168 independent adult males.
Our data revealed that some families were highly cohesive, while others were less so, splitting and rejoining along irregular lines. We also observed variation in how social and gregarious the families were. We hypothesized that this lack of cohesion was linked to the heavy poaching during the civil war (1977–1992), which left many families fragmented and without matriarchs or older females to provide leadership.
Members of Gorongosa's C family engage in a group-charge.
We know that elephants are adaptable and quick to learn. One question we had was how rapidly they would realize that the park was safe again, and that tourists no longer represented a threat. We wanted to understand how they would adapt their behavior — who would do so first, and how long it might take them to re-colonize Gorongosa.
As we went about our work, we kept detailed records of how different families responded to our presence and how their reactions changed over time. We approached elephants slowly and cautiously, turning off the engine at the first sign of apprehension or aggression. In this way, we tried to show them that we understood and respected their signals — that we meant no harm.
The legacies of poaching in Gorongosa are written not only in elephant behavior but also on their bodies. Many individuals bear bullet scars or holes in their ears — reminders of the violence they endured. Among elephants over 25 years old, the population remains heavily skewed toward females, since large-tusked males were preferentially targeted and killed. The most striking physical legacy, however, is the extraordinary number of tuskless females. In most elephant populations, tusklessness is rare, but in Gorongosa it has become one of the most visible consequences of the civil war and the intense ivory hunting that accompanied it. These visible and demographic scars — from skewed sex ratios, missing tusks to altered behavior — are living evidence of how deeply human exploitation can reshape wildlife populations.
A few biological facts help explain the occurrence of tusklessness in elephant populations that have endured heavy poaching. Tusks grow throughout an elephant’s life, meaning older elephants bear the largest tusks and are therefore the first to be targeted by hunters. Tusks are sexually dimorphic — those of males can weigh up to seven times more than those of females of the same age. Tusklessness itself is a naturally occurring trait, typically found in only about 2–4% of females in lightly poached or stable populations. It is extremely rare in males because tusks play a crucial role in male-male competition for access to females. Through evolution, this has resulted in strong selection for tusks in males. But, we discovered a genetic reason, too.
Because poachers preferentially kill elephants with large tusks, those without tusks have a higher chance of survival and reproduction. Over generations, this advantage increases the frequency of tusklessness within the population. A high proportion of tuskless elephants therefore stands as a signature of heavy poaching pressure.
Dominique Gonçalves and Joyce Poole working together in Gorongosa
Building local capacity is essential for long-term conservation success, and this was a core goal of ElephantVoices in Gorongosa. We regularly went into the field with Mozambican biology and veterinary interns, introducing them to elephants and our research methods. Among those we trained was Dominique Gonçalves, who completed her Master’s degree at DICE, University of Kent, in 2016–17. She later earned her PhD and now leads the Elephant Ecology Project at Gorongosa.
Collaboration across Gorongosa National Park’s departments — particularly Conservation, Science, and Human Development - was fundamental to our efforts to monitor and protect the elephants. Because elephants pose risks to people, and people to elephants, the intersection between anti-poaching operations, veterinary work, and human-elephant conflict mitigation was both delicate and crucial. Effective conservation depends on shared information and mutual understanding — a foundation we consistently worked to strengthen.
The largest video and audio library of elephant behaviors.