The most comprehensive study on the illegal ivory trade in Africa has just been released and the findings are bleak: some 100,000 elephants were killed by poachers between 2010 and 2012.
This means that the population of this proboscide has decreased in just two years from 2% to 3%. If the extermination continues at that rate, the large mammal could disappear in many parts of the continent within ten years.
Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , this research is the first to estimate how illegal hunting of elephants is affecting the species throughout the African continent.
To perform the calculation, Colorado State University ecologist George Wittemeyer and his colleagues first analyzed data collected in Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve and found that 2009 saw a surge in poaching killings. At the same time, the activity of the illegal ivory trade to China increased.
They then used the numbers of deaths related to this activity collected by the international program Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE) and related them to other variables, such as the increase in consumption in Chinese society and the number of cases of corruption in the local authorities. In this way, they made a model that helped them extrapolate the data to 306 elephant populations throughout Africa.
Conservationists thus came to the conclusion that each year, in 2010, 2011 and 2012, 33,630 individuals were hunted. This decline could wipe out the species in many parts of the map, warn experts, who have been surprised by the size of the problem.
