Myanmar-U.S. team studies elephants

Myanmar-U.S. team studies elephants

MYANMAR: A joint Myanmar-U.S. wildlife conservation team has attached data-emitting collars to three wild elephants in Myanmar's mountain ranges to survey populations of the beasts, a semiofficial newspaper said on Sunday.

The team last month attached the collars to the three elephants -- two females and a teenage male -- to track their movements in the Bago Yoma mountain ranges north of the capital Yangon, where people have had encounters with the animals, the Myanmar Times reported.

A Global Positioning System device in the collars transmits the precise locations of the giant mammals to a satellite, which forwards the data to a ground station.

Dan Kelly, an ecologist from the U.S.-based Smithsonian National Zoological park and one of the team's leaders, said the devices have already sent valuable information about the elephants' seasonal movements, their impact on human settlements and their preferred habitat.

It was the second time such collars have been fitted to elephants in Myanmar after an earlier project in central Myanmar's Alaungdaw Kathapa National Park in 2002. -- AP