珍しい双子の赤ちゃんゾウ発見　「確率は１％」　ケニア

【ナイロビＡＦＰ＝時事】とても珍しい双子のゾウがケニアで誕生した。保護団体が２０日、発表した。（写真はケニア北部のサンブル国立保護区を移動する母ゾウのボラと双子のゾウの赤ちゃん。セーブ・ジ・エレファンツ提供）
　保護団体セーブ・ジ・エレファンツによると、ボラという名の母ゾウから雄と雌の双子の赤ちゃんが生まれた。
　双子は今週末、ケニア北部のサンブル国立保護区でツアーガイドにより発見された。
　アフリカゾウの妊娠期間は約２２か月と現存する哺乳類の中で最も長く、約４年間隔で出産を行う。
　団体の設立者であるイアン・ダグラスハミルトン氏は「ゾウの双子は珍しい。確率は約１％だ」と述べている。
　ただ、ゾウの双子が無事に育つことは少なく、２００６年にサンブル国立保護区で生まれた双子は数日間しか生きられなかった。
　ダグラスハミルトン氏は、ほとんどの母ゾウが２頭分のミルクを与えられないと指摘し、「生まれてきた双子にとって、これからの数日間が正念場になるだろう。生き続けてくれるように皆で祈っている」と語った。【翻訳編集ＡＦＰＢＢＮｅｗｓ】

〔ＡＦＰ＝時事〕（2022/01/25-13:04）

An elephant in Kenya has given birth to twins, an extremely rare event, conservationists said Thursday.
Conservation group Save the Elephants said the twins -- one male and one female -- were born to a mother named Bora.
They were first spotted by lucky tourist guides on a safari drive at the weekend in Samburu reserve in northern Kenya.
Videos show the days-old newborns getting accustomed to their savannah surroundings with their doting mother and an older sibling, Bora's first calf, born in 2017.
African elephants have the largest gestation period of any living mammal, carrying their young for nearly 22 months, and gives birth roughly every four years.
Twins are rarely encountered in elephant populations and form about only one percent of births, Save the Elephants' founder Iain Douglas-Hamilton said in a statement.
However, elephant twins do not often fare so well. The last pair of twins born in Samburu, in 2006, failed to survive more than a few days.
Quite often the mothers don't have enough milk to support two calves, Douglas-Hamilton said.
The next few days will be touch-and-go for the new twins, but we all have our fingers crossed for their survival.
There are an estimated 36,280 elephants in Kenya, according to the country's first-ever national wildlife census conducted last year.
That figure represented a 12-percent increase in population numbers recorded in 2014, when killing for ivory was higher.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) warned last year that poaching and habitat destruction, particularly due to land conversion for agriculture, had had a devastating effect on elephant numbers in Africa as a whole.
The population of African savanna elephants plunged by at least 60 percent in the last half century, prompting their reclassification as endangered in the latest update to the IUCN's Red List of threatened species.