By Clarence Fernandez

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 9 (Reuters Life!) - Pygmy elephants living in dense jungles on Borneo island face a growing threat to survival as their homes get cut down for timber or plantations, pushing the animals into conflicts with humans, experts said on Thursday.

The warning is a result of Asia's largest project for the satellite tracking of elephants, in which wildlife researchers fitted five animals with radio-transmitting collars to record their wanderings, the World Wide Fund for Nature said.

There are fewer than 1,500 pygmy elephants on Borneo, and they are threatened by the loss of forests in the Malaysian state of Sabah because their huge size requires large feeding grounds and viable breeding populations, researchers said.

"The conversion of forests to plantations remains the biggest threat to Sabah's elephants, because no plantation can provide the types and amounts of foods necessary to sustain breeding populations," they said in a report published on Thursday.

Pygmy elephants are smaller and less aggressive than other Asian elephants, with shorter trunks and smaller faces that give them a rotund appearance.

They are also genetically different, and never seem to have spread beyond the northeast part of Borneo to other areas of the Southeast Asian island, scientists say.

Though Sabah has lost nearly half its forest cover to plantations and human settlement over the last 40 years, it still has one of the largest contiguous areas of habitat for elephants left in Asia.

But the region, which sprawls over 600,000 to 800,000 hectares, continues to be under threat, one researcher said.

"In one day the elephant needs to have more than 200 kg of food, and if the lowland forests are converted to oil palm or other uses, that will reduce the food sources for them," said Raymond Alfred, of the WWF's Sabah project.

"And we still don't know whether they will be able to adapt to the highland forest food sources."

HABITAT SHRINKS

Conflict with people is increasing as the elephants' habitat shrinks, the Fund says in the report, which draws on additional tracking efforts besides the year-long satellite study to paint an alarming picture of the situation the animals face.

About a fifth of the elephants living in one wildlife reserve, the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary, have suffered gruesome injuries from illegal snares, often set by plantation workers to catch smaller game animals.

"In terms of the way the elephants react when they see people, they are more aggressive compared to the last three to five years," Alfred said.

The WWF says the elephant population can be preserved through measures such as marking out and reserving the corridors the animals use to travel through the forest and halting the trend of converting forests into plantations.

Other steps that would help include curbing disturbances from timber felling and intrusions by plantation workers, besides more surveys and satellite tracking to increase knowledge of the elephants' behaviour, the researchers said.

Forestry and wildlife officials in Sabah had agreed to help preserve the elephant's stamping grounds through sustainable management of large tracts of forest, Alfred said.

For example, the state promised last month to earmark about 180,000 hectares (444,800 acres) of forest that are crucial for the orang-utan and the rhino, as well as the elephant -- and use sustainable forestry techniques there, he added.

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