Elephants as invasive species in North America

Say Lincoln accepts the Thai offer of a herd of elephants and the herd is released into the wild post civil war

Could they form a long lasting wild population in North America
 
Elephants are just too big, and the cold would kill them. I'd say you'd have a better chance if you could get a bunch of Macaques to come over and then scatter into Florida or somewhere like New York where they could find plenty of warm nooks and crannies to make their way into.
 
The biggest problem would probably be that in North America, unlike Africa, most of the plants are either conifers or deciduous. Conifers aren't very nutritious or easy to digest, and deciduous trees don't produce leaves in the fall and winter, so I'm not sure a wild elephant population would be able to feed itself. Plus, they wouldn't be used to the winters here (which don't happen in the parts of Africa that elephants live in).
 
The biggest problem would probably be that in North America, unlike Africa, most of the plants are either conifers or deciduous. Conifers aren't very nutritious or easy to digest, and deciduous trees don't produce leaves in the fall and winter, so I'm not sure a wild elephant population would be able to feed itself. Plus, they wouldn't be used to the winters here (which don't happen in the parts of Africa that elephants live in).

What about grasses, though? Perhaps the Great Plains would be more hospitable in that regard?

Of course, my problem is that I'd expect the surviving animals to either go to zoos, or be auctioned off.
 
What about grasses, though? Perhaps the Great Plains would be more hospitable in that regard?
Iirc correctly that was where the mastodons and other American elephants lived. Of course these days it's all farms so...
Of course, my problem is that I'd expect the surviving animals to either go to zoos, or be auctioned off.
Yeah, the most likely outcome unfortunately. Though the brief period before being rounded up again might make the American rewilding movement stronger.
 
Iirc correctly that was where the mastodons and other American elephants lived. Of course these days it's all farms so...

Good point. Ecology aside, releasing wild animals that are way too big to be killed with normal guns would be a great recipe for pissing off the locals wherever they happened to wind up.
 
Remember, these are Asian Elephants. But most things apply.

How many individuals are we talking here? Elephants have too long gestation (about two years) and interestrus periods to build up a large population. I'm not an expert on Elephant behavior, but wild ones tend to avoid humans, and they don't seem to thrive well in highly populated areas (India, as highly populated as it is, still has some regions of wilderness). Most of their diet is small palms, saplings and fruit, and of course large subtropical virgin forests are hard to find in North America. And I think Elephants, as large as they are, would be quite resistant to cold; a cold spell won't kill them. The possible diseases and weakening most probably could.

The only place I can see them thriving is the American South, perhaps Lousiana and Florida, and Central America. I am not sure how the food is there, in fact they might prefer eat from introduced crops. While the idea of elephants in the Bayou is amusing, I think even those places are still too densely populated for Asian Elephants to live comfortably (African Elephants are even more migratory) and I think the local population would eventually kill them or capture them.

There is also the US Camel Corps experiment on this period. Unfortunately, I'm not sure why the camels died off. I'm thinking they just weren't adapted to find food in the American Southwest by themselves: Bactrian Camels are domesticated after all. They seem to be more succesful in Australia.

Interestingly, a very similar case happened in Colombia when some hippos from Pablo Escobar's private zoo escaped (a male and three females). They now number about 50, maybe more(!), and if you know anything about hippos, they can be very dangerous to people and native plant life. Of course, such a strange case is only possible because hippos have higher reproduction rates (and they even lowered their maturity age from 3 years to 1 in Colombia), the climate in Colombia is mostly ideal for them, and they live in a relatively remote area.

Do keep in mind that Mastodons, which were basically Elephants lived in the Americas (including, ironically, Colombia) until nearly historical times, about 8000 years ago. Same with many other megafauna (giant sloths, gliptodons, etc.). There is precedent for megafauna in the Americas (in fact, some paleontologists would venture to say that our current ecosystems like the Pampas and the Great Plains are 'depleted' from major mammals). But it DOESN'T mean that Asian Elephants could easily replace Mastodons, or Hippopotamus, Toxodons. Most likely, certain particular adaptations to the American enviroments went extinct with them. And they would certainly wreck havoc in our current ecosystems.

Still, Elephants in the Pampas? Interesting thought.
 
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Duh, I forgot that there's millions of acres of extremely productive farmland in the US that produces billions of dollars in foodstuffs every year. So the elephants would have more than enough to eat. Of course, by doing so, they would be destroying the property of American citizens, so the military would probably be called in to wrangle the elephants onto a preserve or auctioned off to zoos. Or they'd just get poached by angry farmers
 
Although Wikipedia isn't the best source; a quick glance introduced me to something called Pleistocene "rewilding" which is basically a small movement dedicated to the idea that American and to a lesser extant European ecosystems are not working right because they developed under the presence of megafauna. This in order to fix them they are trying to reintroduce species to their original ranges or new species that could fill the niche of a now extinct relative.

In Wikipedia it says the Asian elephant although living in basically only tropical environments used to historically have a large range into temperate China and thus could survive in North America (and probably a lot more place in Central and South America)...
 
The Deep South would probably be suitable for elephants, since the climate doesn't get too cold in the winter. There is a large elephant sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee, although they do have heated barns for the elephants the winter (Hohenwald is a bit colder than the Gulf, though). They eat a lot of local plants. Florida might be the best state for elephants, since back in the post-Civil War era, most of Florida outside the Florida Panhandle was barely inhabited. There's plenty of space in the interior of Florida for elephants to live.
 
Elephants are just too big, and the cold would kill them. I'd say you'd have a better chance if you could get a bunch of Macaques to come over and then scatter into Florida or somewhere like New York where they could find plenty of warm nooks and crannies to make their way into.
I'd love to see that. Monkeys riding the subway and stealing hot dogs
 
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