Researchers worry that the loss of elders, especially the matriarchs that were targeted by poachers for their large tusks, would severely impair the ability of younger ones to survive and thrive. The matriarchs carry a vast amount of knowledge about their surroundings, including safe migratory routes, the availability of water in arid landscapes, threats from predators and other vital information.

“Habiba and all her brothers and sisters and cousins — they’re just in a little group. Their mothers were all dead,” Dr. Wittemyer said. “These kids stuck together, but they didn’t have any adult supervision, so to speak. We were really scared about what was going to happen.”

But researchers have watched as the social networks of Samburu’s elephants help them regroup, with young daughters assuming bigger roles in caretaking. Even females as young as 15 “tended to emulate the social contact pattern of their mothers,” Dr. Wittemyer said. “If their mothers are highly social and their mother dies, the kids tend to be highly social. And if the mothers are not, the kids tend not to be.”

Less social mothers have produced less social children with smaller networks, a phenomenon that researchers are still studying.

Those findings, published in the journal Current Biology this year, offer some hope during a bleak time for elephants. The current poaching epidemic started in 2009, but so slowly that researchers in Samburu did not realize its severity. “In 2010, we started getting very concerned; 2011 was a disaster,” Dr. Wittemyer said.

Social networks are just one area of research for Save the Elephants, in addition to how elephants are migrating and whether orphans show negative physical effects after their mothers are killed. And though these conservation biologists study animals, their work starkly reflects the effects humans have on the elephants’ environment.