Why African elephant poop is so important to this American guitar company : NPR

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The world is connected in surprising ways. A new study gives the latest example – how African elephant poop helps make American-made guitars. As NPR’s Nate Rott reports, the study also comes with a warning.

NATE ROTT, BYLINE: Well, let’s start with the guitars and kind of work our way backwards.

BOB TAYLOR: My name is Bob Taylor, and I’m the cofounder of Taylor Guitars.

ROTT: One of the most popular and best-selling guitar brands in the world. In 2011, Taylor and a partner bought a sawmill in West Africa, in Cameroon, a sawmill that specialized in ebony.

TAYLOR: So ebony has a very mechanical usefulness on the guitar, and that’s that it’s primarily used for the fingerboard, you know, the neck of the guitar.

ROTT: Ebony is a tropical hardwood. It’s rare, expensive, with a jet-black core. And most importantly for guitars and other stringed instruments like violins, it’s hard.

TAYLOR: So that you could push a vibrating string against it and, No. 1, it sounds good because it’s a hard surface to resonate with.

ROTT: And No. 2…

TAYLOR: That string isn’t going to wear a hole in it within the first five minutes.

ROTT: Not long after buying the sawmill and fixing it up, Taylor found himself wondering.

TAYLOR: How much ebony is there that’s even left? And what happens if we run out?

ROTT: Was anyone planting trees? How are they pollinated? How do they even really grow? He looked online, asked around.

TAYLOR: And nobody knows anything about this at all.

ROTT: Then in Cameroon, he met Tom Smith, a conservation ecologist from the University of California, Los Angeles, who’d been working in Africa for 40 years.

TOM SMITH: I had been interested in seed dispersal by vertebrates generally.

ROTT: How animals like birds and apes help trees move across a landscape by eating and depositing their seeds wherever they go.

SMITH: Because in rainforests, generally, you know, about 80- to 90% of the forest trees require vertebrates to move their seeds.

ROTT: Taylor decided to help fund a project that Smith would lead to better understand ebony trees and how their seeds, which are about the size of an apple, are spread. A guitar company funding science?

TAYLOR: One of my favorite quotes from Jerry Garcia was, “somebody’s got to do something about this. It’s just pathetic it has to be us” (ph).

ROTT: With the funding, Smith hired Vincent Deblauwe.

VINCENT DEBLAUWE: We started counting and measuring ebony trees in different forests in Cameroon.

ROTT: Deblauwe is a tropical forest ecologist, now with UCLA, who’s talking to us from Cameroon. And he says finding ebony is hard.

DEBLAUWE: To find just one big tree – I mean the type that loggers would cut – you have to screen an area that’s like 70 to 200 football fields.

ROTT: For help, he worked with a local Indigenous community, the Baka. And during their outings in the rainforest, the Baka mentioned something interesting. They often found ebony saplings growing out of elephant dung. Deblauwe set up game cameras near some of the ebony trees they found…

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ROTT: …And sure enough, they recorded videos of elephants picking up ebony fruit off the forest floor with their long trunks. The Baka were right.

DEBLAUWE: They correctly identified the elephants as a probable main ebony planter of the rainforest.

ROTT: Here’s why that’s not entirely good news.

SMITH: Poaching is decimating African forest elephants.

ROTT: Smith says between 2002 and 2011, elephant populations in that area dropped by nearly two-thirds.

SMITH: So and this is all due to harvesting of ivory from elephants.

ROTT: As a result, there’s less ebony. In the new study published in the journal Science Advances, they found that in places where elephants had been removed from the rainforest, there was nearly a 70% reduction in ebony saplings.

SMITH: You can think about Paul McCartney’s song about ebony and ivory. It’s about harmony between those two things. So that’s really important, right?

ROTT: So to preserve ebony for guitars or furniture, just because it’s such a unique tree, Smith says, we need to also preserve elephants.

Nate Rott, NPR News.

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