19/12/05 ( Kota Kinabalu: Human activities such as logging and farming have been hindering a six-month study of Sabah's unique Borneo pygmy elephants as the movements of these animals have been affected.

Five female elephants had been fitted with collars and tracked via satellite. Pygmy elephants are smaller and gentler compared with other Asian elephants. They are found mainly in Sabah.

Dr Christy Williams, who leads WWF's Asian elephant conservation efforts, said the affected elephants spent more time on the move compared with the ones in more remote areas.

"One of the collared elephants living near an area with human activity, covered a third more ground than did another which lives in a more remote part of the jungle," she said in a statement yesterday.

She said satellite tracking also showed that most of the elephants spent at least some of their time in oil palm plantations or near areas inhabited by humans, which led to conflicts with the people.

"In recent years, much of the elephants' habitat has been converted to plantations," she said.

She said the elephants' diet consisted of at least 162 plant species. "No one has ever studied pygmy elephants before, so everything that we are learning is groundbreaking data," she said.

The study was a joint venture project between WWF-Malaysia and the Sabah Wildlife Department, with support from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The public can track the elephants' movements by logging on to www.worldwildlife.org/ borneomap.

Since elephants live in matriarchal societies, WWF collared only adult female elephants as each would represent the movements of a whole herd.

Dr Williams said wildlife researchers would be tracking these elephants for several years to identify their home ranges, and to work with the Sabah government to conserve critical areas.

Project manager Raymond Alfred said the research efforts were to enable scientists to learn more about the elephants' behaviour.

"Elephants are a 'keystone species' and habitat engineers whose impact shapes the forest in important ways for the many other species with whom they share their habitat," he said.

Sabah Wildlife Department Director Mahedi Andau said the project was very important and that the results from the study could be used to assist them in preparing Sabah's elephant conservation plan.

The Borneo pygmy elephants were determined by WWF in 2003 to be a likely new sub-species of the Asian elephant but very little is known about them, including how many exist today.