African elephants are increasingly being born without tusks. The reason for this is that the ivory is hunted by poachers.
Goinha – The hunt for them is cruel, greed is the motive behind the bloody tale of suffering of the elephants. According to Pro Wildlife, around 20,000 animals die every year. For thousands of years poachers (* FR reported) have targeted those for the precious tusks – ivory. A new discovery now shows that this is not without consequences.
According to a study, female African elephants are more and more often born without tusks. The trigger for this is, among other things, the Mozambican civil war from 1977. In this war, elephants were killed in large numbers because of their ivory. The sale of the tusks was supposed to raise money for weapons and soldiers. However, this fact has created a strong evolutionary selection pressure.
Certain factors from the environment influence the survival of a population. Before the civil war in Mozambique, about 2,000 elephants lived in the Gorongosa National Park in Goinha, as reported by Deutschlandfunk (DLF) . Since the early 1990s, more than 90 percent of the population has been killed as a result of poaching. Only those elephants that did not have tusks were spared.
Mozambican Civil War: Elephants Survive Without Ivory
“There are elephants without tusks all over Africa, but the phenomenon is relatively rare. In the Gorongosa National Park, for example, only 18 percent of the animals had no tusks before the civil war. But then we looked at data from the time after the end of the war and stocks had collapsed dramatically. At the same time, 50 percent of the few animals still alive suddenly had no tusks, “explained Brian Arnold of Princeton University to DLF. This is particularly unusual because around two percent of female African elephants are born without tusks.
Between 1995 and 2004, every third female in the national park was born without tusks, reports Business Insider . The scientists assume that the congenital absence of tusks is specifically linked to one gender, namely the female.
Ivory is also traded in the EU. According to WWF, European customs officials discovered 1,258 tusks between 2014 and 2015. However, the commercial ivory trade is prohibited worldwide. Much of the ivory is illegally exported to Asia. * FR is an offer from IPPEN.Media.
