Because of the pressures of poaching, elephants in parts of Africa are increasingly being born without tusks.
“It’s a genetic change,” National Geographic Explorer and University of Idaho behavioral ecologist Ryan Long explained to CTV News Channel.
“When poachers are removing individuals from a population that have the capacity to grow tusks, the individuals that lack that capacity have higher survival. They pass more of their genes onto the next generation and you get an increase in the prevalence of tusklessness. That’s evolution in action.”
In findings presented by National Geographic, it was revealed that 32 per cent of female elephants born in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park since 1992 lacked tusks. That country’s 15-year civil war, which ended in 1992, saw roughly 90 per cent of their elephant population killed as poachers harvested ivory to finance the bloody conflict.
This effect of poaching has been mirrored elsewhere on the continent, with National Geographic reporting that 98 per cent of female elephants in South Africa’s Addo Elephant National Park were born without tusks in the early 2000s. According to National Geographic data, on average, only two to four per cent of female wild African elephants are tuskless.
“I think it’s reasonable to assume that as long as there has been significant poaching pressure on populations of elephants for their ivory, that you’ve probably had this kind of effect as a possibility,” Long said. “The population in Addo really highlights just how pronounced this kind of effect can be when poaching pressure is heavy enough.”
While lacking tusks might increase elephants’ chances of survival where poaching is prevalent, researchers like Long also worry what effects such a dramatic physiological change could have in the long run.
“We’re also interested in understanding the degree to which tusklessness might influence the behaviour of elephants, their social dynamics, their foraging behaviour,” he said. “Elephants use their tusks for all sorts of different things and so we’re trying to figure out right now if there are behavioural consequences to tusklessness that then scale up to influence the health and performance of elephant populations on the whole.”
