A new study has revealed that elephants took just three months to master all the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) underpasses at the Tsavo National Park.
The 578-kilometer Nairobi-Mombasa SGR line divided the elephants’ territory at the Tsavo Conservation Area in two.
The study published in the African Journal of Ecology notes that “this fast learning is indicative of elephants’ high intelligence.”
Researchers arrived at the conclusion after monitoring the movement of the 10 jumbos fitted with satellite collars.
The animals mostly crossed the railway line and the adjacent highway at night. Female elephants with babies increased their speed while crossing, suggesting that they felt the underpasses to be risky.
The study was conducted at the Tsavo Conservation Area, home to about 12,000 elephants.
In 2014, environmental activists protested the construction of SGR through Tsavo citing the interruption to the ecosystem.
The railway stretches for 133 kilometers through the Tsavo East and Tsavo West National Parks and is fenced on both sides to allow wild animals to cross via the designated underpasses.
There are six underpasses, each measuring 70 meters long and six meters high, as well as nine bridges that animals can walk under.
“Only around 70 percent of the animals that we collared were actually utilizing the underpasses,” said Benson Okita-Ouma, lead author of the study.
