| For my presentation today |
| I want to tell you about how groups of elephants have been moved and settled in new reserves. |
| This is known as translocation and has been carried out in Malawi in Africa in recent years. |
| The reason this is being done is because of overpopulation of elephants in some areas. |
| Overpopulation is a good problem to have |
| and not one we tend to hear about very often. |
| In Malawi's Majete National Park |
| the elephant population had been wiped out by poachers, |
| who killed the elephants for their ivory. |
| But in 2003, |
| the park was restocked and effective law enforcement was introduced. |
| Since then, not a single elephant has been poached. |
| In this safe environment, the elephant population boomed. |
| Breeding went so well that there were more elephants than the park could support. |
| This led to a number of problems. |
| Firstly, there was more competition for food, |
| which meant that some elephants were suffering from hunger. |
| As there was a limit to the amount of food in the national park, |
| some elephants began looking further afield. |
| Elephants were routinely knocking down fences around the park, |
| which then had to be repaired at a significant cost. |
| To solve this problem, |
| the decision was made to move dozens of elephants from Majete National Park to Nkhotakota Wildlife Park, |
| where there were no elephants. |
| But, obviously, attempting to move significant numbers of elephants to a new home 300 kilometres away is quite a challenge. |
| So how did this translocation process work in practice? |
| Elephants were moved in groups of between eight and twenty, |
| all belonging to one family. |
| Because relationships are very important to elephants, |
| they all had to be moved at the same time. |
| A team of vets and park rangers flew over the park in helicopters and targeted a group, |
| which were rounded up and directed to a designated open plain. |
| The vets then used darts to immobilise the elephants. |
| This was a tricky manoeuvre, |
| as they not only had to select the right dose of tranquiliser for different-sized elephants |
| but they had to dart the elephants as they were running around. |
| This also had to be done as quickly as possible |
| so as to minimise the stress caused. |
| As soon as the elephants began to flop onto the ground, |
| the team moved in to take care of them. |
| To avoid the risk of suffocation, |
| the team had to make sure none of the elephants were lying on their chests |
| because their lungs could be crushed in this position. |
| So all the elephants had to be placed on their sides. |
| One person stayed with each elephant |
| while they waited for the vets to do checks. |
| It was very important to keep an eye on their breathing. |
| If there were fewer than six breaths per minute, |
| the elephant would need urgent medical attention. |
| Collars were fitted to the matriarch in each group |
| so their movements could be tracked in their new home. |
| Measurements were taken of each elephant's tusks. |
| Elephants with large tusks would be at greater risk from poachers |
| and also of their feet. |
| The elephants were then taken to a recovery area |
| before being loaded onto trucks and transported to their new home. |
| The elephants translocated to Nkhotakota settled in very well |
| and the project has generally been accepted to have been a huge success |
| and not just for the elephants. |
| Employment prospects have improved enormously, |
| contributing to rising living standards for the whole community. |
| Poaching is no longer an issue, |
| as former poachers are able to find more reliable sources of income. |
| In fact, many of them volunteered to give up their weapons, |
| as they were no longer of any use to them. |
| More than two dozen elephants have been born at Nkhotakota since relocation. |
| With an area of more than 1,800 square kilometres, |
| there's plenty of space for the elephant population to continue to grow. |
| Their presence is also helping to rebalance Nkhotakota's damaged ecosystem |
| and providing a sustainable conservation model, which could be replicated in other parks. |
| All this has been a big draw for tourism, |
| which contributes five times more than the illegal wildlife trade to GDP, |
| and this is mainly because of the elephants. |
| There's also been a dramatic rise... |