This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Jason Goldman.

Imagine a world without elephants.

Not only would we have lost one of the planet's most charismatic extraordinary creatures.

Also gone would be a network of ecosystem engineers because elephants are crucial for other

creatures to exist. They disperse seeds in their copious droppings. By literally cutting

paths through forests as they trample trees and bushes, they create a more complex landscape.

And now we know that their very footprints are important.

We were walking through the forest in Kibale National Park, and that's when we stumbled upon this waterfilled elephant footprints.

University of Koblen's Landau Ecologist Wolfram Remmers.

Well we looked at them and we quickly noticed that they were not only filled by water but there were lots of animals living in them. Remmers and his colleagues discovered that elephant footprints are a critical habitat for aquatic invertebrates like The to see just who calls this unique habitat their home, and all they found 61 species from 27 taxonomic orders.

The researchers then created 18 artificial footprints to see how fast they would be colonized. Water beetles

showed up on day one. After five days 410 individual invertebrates were

occupying the prince. The findings are in the African Journal of Ecology.

If you think of this footprints as tiny islands in a big forest, it was amazing to me to see

how quickly these small animals could find them and colonize them and use

them as habitat for foraging and reproduction and living.

In some places elephant footprints are the only stagnant ponds to be found which could mean that these insects depend on the pachyderms for their very survival

But because this discovery is so new, nobody really knows how critical these habitats are.

We are not sure how much they are really dependent on elephant-made footprints in other areas,

or if they would completely disappear or if they would just be there in a lower number.

Without additional protections, elephants will undoubtedly disappear from large swaths of their ranges, which means a huge community of invertebrates might be severely restricted in their ability to move across the landscape.

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