This is one of the things I love about HN. Someone makes a flippant comment and I get to learn something interesting cause someone else posts a response like it was a serious statement. I find myself correcting people's flippant comments often, or at least thinking about doing it, and most people just seem annoyed. I really enjoy learning something new even if it's tangential to the topic at hand.
Tangent interested should check out http://www.greenermedia.com/hec.html for more on HEC(human elephant conflict) and to read about their recent trip to Sri Lanka(second) to finish filming a documentary called Common Ground. Can't wait to see it! Elephants and rural farmers need all the help they can get.
Also: Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society www.slwcs.org
I actually had to laugh when reading it the first time because it seemed such a neat spoof on the article in so few words. You could have used bacteria or insects just the same. Just goes to show that there are many well known facts that turn out to be not that well known after all.
Perhaps your original intent would have been more immediately obvious if you had chosen a different animal that's also almost extinct, but not synonomous in people's minds with large size more so than the fact of their near extinction? Or was that also part of the original intent?
I admit that the analogy is a bit leaky, but the point is that ants are nowhere near extinct, even though they may be much smaller than elephants. Where it breaks down is if you consider the number of ants vs elephants globally. I probably shouldn't have said "total" mass, just relative mass.
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/26/14028.full