So, how many elephants is too many elephants? It's a question people have wrestled with for ages. Kruger National Park, home to one of Africa's largest elephant populations, has seen their numbers grow from just a handful in the early 1900s to over 31,000 by 2020. That's a lot of elephants! A recent study using smarter aerial surveys and fancy math gives us a more clear picture of just how fast these gentle giants are multiplying. Turns out, since 2013, their numbers have been growing by about 5.3% each year. But here's the twist: counting elephants isn't as simple as flying over the park and tallying them. Old methods often missed a lot - thanks to things like human error or elephants being hard to spot from the air. This new approach combines traditional counts with statistical adjustments, and in 2020, scientists estimated 31,324 elephants (give or take a few thousand). Is this a conservation success story? Absolutely! But it also comes with challenges. For some people, more elephants mean more pressure on Kruger’s trees, water, and other animals. Still, the study points out that the number of elephants isn’t the whole story - it’s what they're doing, where they're hanging out, and how long they’re sticking around that really matters.