Status
Critically Endangered
Habitat
Congo Basin rainforest
Range
Africa
Group
Elephants
The species that plants the rainforest it walks through.
Forest elephants disperse the seeds of large-fruited trees that nothing else can swallow. Those trees are among the densest-wooded and highest carbon-storing in the Congo Basin. Lose the elephant and you slowly lose the forest's carbon architecture.
Populations have fallen by more than eighty-six percent over thirty-one years. They breed slowly, first calving in their twenties, which makes recovery a multi-generational proposition even under perfect protection.
