There's a Musical Reason Why We Need Elephants

A new study highlights just how much African forest elephants mean for rainforests—and for the wood that ends up as piano keys and guitar fretboards. After Taylor Guitars' Bob Taylor purchased an ebony mill in Cameroon in 2011, he developed some questions, reports NPR: "How much ebony is there that's even left? And what happens if we run out?" In his quest to learn more about how to grow the prized trees, which can take up to two centuries to mature, he hit dead ends. Then he met UCLA conservation ecologist Thomas Smith, and the Ebony Project was born. Nearly a decade later, the group has zeroed in on an unexpected factor in the growth of the trees: elephants.

In a study published in Science Advances, Smith and his colleagues explain how the massive mammals are essential to dispersing ebony and other tree seeds: Elephants eat the fruit, carry apple-sized seeds far from the parent tree, and deposit them in dung—that dung enclosure and the lack of remaining edible fruit around the seeds safeguards them from rodents that would under normal circumstances eat them. In places where elephant populations have been decimated, researchers found 68% fewer ebony saplings and increased inbreeding among the remaining trees, which could spell disaster for genetic diversity and long-term survival.

"People think, 'Oh, it's a shame these magnificent creatures are threatened,' but what they don't understand is that we won't just lose elephants, we'll also lose the ecological functions they provide," said Smith in a press release. The release notes locals and Indigenous groups have played a key role in this research and reforestation effort, with the Ebony Project planting 40,000 ebony trees and 20,000 fruit trees so far. For Taylor, whose guitars depend on this wood and who is the chief funder of the project, the bigger lesson is about giving back: "Sometimes the most important work is about planting seeds for others to benefit from."