Tests show Borneo elephants are a distinct subspecies

Tests show Borneo elephants are a distinct subspecies

Elephants on Borneo are a distinct subspecies with bigger ears and straighter tusks than cousins on Sumatra and mainland Asia and special care should be taken to save them, the World Wide Fund for Nature said.

"Borneo's elephants' genetic distinctiveness makes them one of the highest priority populations for conservation," WWF Malaysia said in a recent statement giving results of genetic tests on elephant dung from Malaysia's Sabah state.

"As such, they should be managed separately from other Asian elephants," it said, adding animals from Borneo should not be crossbred with their Asian relatives.

Research done by New York's Columbia University showed Borneo's elephants were separated from their mainland Asian and Sumatran cousins about 300,000 years ago.

Elephants on Borneo island, which is made up of the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak, the large Indonesian province of Kalimantan and the tiny country of Brunei, are smaller and milder-mannered than other Asian elephants.

The conservation group said the findings scotched a theory that elephants in Sabah were descendants of tame ones given by the British East India Company to the Sultan of Sulu a couple of centuries ago.

Scientists compared DNA from the Borneo elephants with that of ones from Sri Lanka, India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Peninsular Malaysia and Sumatra.

The fund estimates there are more than 1,000 elephants left on Borneo, one of the region's most important populations, though the animals face habitat loss from logging and farming.

Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) are smaller and less plentiful than African ones (Loxodonta africana), though both species suffer pressure from poaching and shrinking ranges. -- Reuters