The Deadly Price of Safety
The Mozambican civil war from 1977 to 1992 decimated 90 percent of the elephant population living in the country’s Gorongosa national park.
The large mammals were poached for their ivory, which government and rebel forces collected to finance the conflict. Tuskless elephants, however, were left alone.
Recently, scientists studied how years of ivory poaching and a genetic mutation resulted in Gorongosa’s elephant population becoming predominately tuskless, the Guardian reported.
In their paper, a research team stipulated that tuskless females had the most offspring because they were not hunted by poachers. Nevertheless, previous researchers had questioned what the exact mechanics for this abnormality were.
It turned out that the phenomenon had a genetic origin and tended to affect mainly male elephants: The team discovered a genetic difference after they sequenced the genomes of tusked and tuskless elephants.
While the females had no issues carrying the tuskless traits, the latter was lethal to males, according to the New York Times.
That means that a female elephant has a 50-50 chance of giving birth to both tuskless and tusked females. But in males, only half would have no tusks, while the other half would die – perhaps before birth.
Robert Pringle of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, which led the study, said it showed the impact of human interference in nature. “What I think this study shows is that it’s more than just numbers,” he told the Guardian. “The impacts that people have, we’re literally changing the anatomy of animals.”
Meanwhile, study co-author Shane Campbell-Staton told the Times that while elephants have evolved to be safer from poachers, this rapid change could be problematic in the long run.
“Selection always comes at a cost, and that cost is lives,” he said.
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