A new study concludes that the killing of wild African elephants
for their ivory is worse than ever, even though international trade
in ivory has been banned since 1989. As this ScienCentral News video
explains, scientists are using a new forensic tracking technique
that can follow the trail of elephant DNA to help pinpoint the
poachers.
Path to Extinction?
Endangered African elephants are under attack by poachers at
levels not seen since before the Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species (CITES) banned the ivory trade in 1989, according to
research published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences' online early edition.
Sam Wasser, director of the University of
Washington's Center for Conservation Biology, used a new DNA tracing technique to reveal the
geographical source of the biggest single seizure of illegal ivory
in history. In 2002, officials found six-and-a-half tons of poached
ivory in a shipping container from southern Africa.
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Sam Wasser, University of
Washington
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Wasser says
investigators hypothesized that the huge shipment may have been
amassed by a widespread smuggling network from sources all over
Africa. "Is all this ivory coming from one location or are they
taking stockpiled ivory from a variety of places, pulling it
together, shipping this out?" he explains.
Wasser and his team collected DNA from samples of elephant tissue
and dung from across the continent for years, and created maps of
recognizable genetic signatures of elephants based on their region
of origin. Comparing samples from the 2002 seizure to the maps
showed that most of the ivory seized in that shipment came from a
single country, Zambia. "It gave us a fairly high degree of
precision to tell us where these samples came from," Wasser
says.
He says that's a frightening result because it means the
intensity of poaching is far higher than was thought. "The fact that
there's that much coming out of there -- holy cow!" he says. "What's
coming out of everywhere else?"
But identifying the victims could help not just in catching the
criminals but also in better protecting heavily poached elephant
populations. "That's why the information from these dead elephants
is so vital," says Wasser.
"Lowest overall population in history"
The authors say the explosion in poaching has African elephants
farther down the path to extinction than before the 1989 ban. The
International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) estimates that in the
1970s and '80s, African elephant populations declined from 1.3 million
to 625,000.
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Wasser's team used DNA from samples of
elephant tissue to figure out the origin of the tusks.
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A 2002 status report estimated there are between
400,000 and 660,000 African elephants left on the continent. Bill
Clark, an advisor to IFAW and a co-author on the PNAS paper, says
"that's the lowest overall population in history."
The authors write that between August 2005 and August 2006,
customs officials seized nearly 26 tons of African elephant ivory.
Clark says that's nearly four times as much as previous years. It's
widely assumed that customs only intercepts around 10% of contraband
drugs and weapons, which it aggressively targets with the help of
high-tech scanners and detection dogs. "Ivory is probably much
less," says Clark. Applying the conservative 10% seized to illegal
ivory, the authors estimate the current level of trade represents
some 23,000 killed elephants per year.
Clark says that the elephant population "should be growing by at
least 20,000 elephants a year, but we're not seeing that." He
explains that "poachers target adults because they have the biggest
ivory… the enormous amount of poaching through the 1970s and '80s
left a high percent of juveniles in the population. Those juveniles
were maturing through the '90s, but when they did reach reproductive
maturity around 2000, then the poaching started again. The
population should have started climbing." If poaching continues, he
says, "the population declines will be steep because poachers are
once again targeting the mature elephants."
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| image: Humane Society of
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"Right now the
ivory trade is the worst in history," says Wasser. "The reason is
that Far Eastern economic growth has jacked up the price." He says
as the price of ivory has quadrupled in the past two years—and so
has poaching—with a dramatic increase in the role of organized crime. "We need to close down the trade," he says.
Wasser says the ban was working until 1993, when Western nations
withdrew funding for enforcement aid, believing the problem had been
solved. The authors call for a re-infusion of aid from
industrialized nations to its previous scale. "We stopped the trade
in 1989 and we can stop it again," Wasser says.
Wasser's research was published in Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, early online edition, February
26, 2007 and funded by US Fish and Wildlife Service African Elephant
Conservation Fund and International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).