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