University of Washington conservationist Samuel Wasser noticed that elephant tusks from ivory seizures have been getting smaller. That means that poachers are running out of adult elephants to kill and are targeting younger pachyderms. It also means his research in the fight against poachers is becoming more important by the day.
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Elephant poaching really took off during the last decade, and it’s estimated that 111,000 individuals—up to a fifth of the full African population—have been killed since 2006. The slaughter is a local problem, but it eventually ties into organized crime networks that ship the plundered ivory around in huge containers that weigh half a ton or more. Once they leave port, these shipments are very hard to find. “There are so many containers on cargo ships that even the most sophisticated ports can inspect just 1 to 2 percent of them,” Wasser says. “If you’re a transnational criminal, you really just have to get your contraband into a container on a ship, and there’s a very low chance someone will find it in a search. We need to stop the trade before it enters into transit.”
To do that, Wasser first needed to find out where the ivory is coming from—and he began with poop. By collecting elephant dung from across Africa, and extracting DNA from them, he and his colleagues created a genetic map of the continent’s pachyderms. By cross-referencing the DNA from an unknown tusk to this map, Wasser can pinpoint the tooth’s source to within 200 miles. In this way, he showed that almost all the ivory that’s been seized in the last decade has come from just two poaching hotspots—one that includes Gabon and the Congo, and another centered in Tanzania.
DNA sequencing is just one way modern sleuths are working to thwart elephant poachers. Read more about the global ivory trade and what’s being done to fight it at the Atlantic. -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: Bernard Gagnon)
Source: neatorama