Those looking at the x-ray screen, which shows the trackers inside, think Im smuggling a bomb. Two genes stood out: MEP1a and AMELX, which are active in tooth development in other mammals, were present in seven elephants with tusks, but had unique mutations in 11 tuskless elephants. Later, when Labuschagne examined the trajectory of bullets at the scene, he concluded that the poachers had been trained in how to set up a cross fire, which, combined with evidence found at the scene, pointed to President Omar al-Bashirs Sudan Armed Forces. His control is absolute.. A global march demanding action to stop elephant and rhino poaching will be held . Read about our approach to external linking. We'll tell you more about them Friday, on NPR's Morning Edition. As far as Onen knew, the poaching squad he abandoned was still making its way north from Garamba through CAR to Sudan. Those elephants were featured in an NPR program, Radio Expeditions, in 2002, when former NPR host and correspondent Alex Chadwick and sound engineer Bill McQuay went to central Africa to record them. At the time Sudans north and south were in a civil war, and Kony offered Sudans government, in Khartoum, a way to destabilize the south. Turkalo is compact and direct, and wears her dark hair pulled back in a bun. Andrea Turkalo sketched the ears and other details of the elephants she studied to help identify them. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. The Central African Republic was peaceful back then. Earlier this year Kony suffered the defection of his commander of operations, Dominic Ongwen, who told African Union forces that Konys desire for ivory was reinforced by Seleka. A few days later the tusks proceed to Songo, the Sudanese market town where Onen said Konys men trade ivory. Tusklessness, according to a new paper in Science, can be attributed in large part to a dominant mutation on the X chromosome a genetic change that also explains the sex skew Poole saw. Ongwen said Konys plan is to obtain as much ivory as possible for his future survival should he not be able to overthrow the government of Uganda.. Despite their lack of tusks, it's often the females who can be seen defending the herd. Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. Track the GPS unit in an interactive map. 4. An official in Dar es Salaams international airport, in Tanzaniaone of several countries I scouted for launching my tusks into the illegal tradesquints at an x-ray screen as my luggage rolls through hisscanner. In January 2014, while x-raying a Vietnam-bound container declared to hold cashews, Togolese port authorities saw something strange: ivory. Dry season in, rainy season out. Sudanese and Chadian poachers were likewise implicated in the 2013 butchering of nearly 90 elephantsincluding 33 pregnant females as well as newborn calvesnear Tikem, Chad, not far from Bouba Ndjidah. It sort of found me. But it failed to rout Kony or his leadership. He wasnt contrite. So far theyve traveled 600 miles from jungle to desert in just under two months. Theyre in a place 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the ambient temperature, so perhaps theyve been buried in the backyard. National Geographic television producer J.J.Kelley takes the floor in the waiting area. In . FANIE PELLETIER: It's one of the most detailed example of how human activity can influence the genes of a population. A small proportion of females . That's where Princeton evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton found himself a few years ago. Several Tanzanian officers who had presided over my arrest at the airport, including the wildlife expert, returned the next day to wish us bon voyage. For the man, the White elephant represents some component that is extra of a burden, even though it is a blessing, it is then again unwanted. I want Dante to design an artificial elephant tusk that has the look and feel of confiscated tusks loaned to me by the U.S. The results suggest that by killing elephants for their tusks, poachers selected for mutated versions of AMELX and MEP1a, which spread in the population and made tuskless elephants more common. Margaret Acino was 23, pregnant, working in the fields near Gulu, Uganda, when an LRA commander called for a razor and ordered his boy soldiers to slice off her lips, ears, and nose. Once the war and poaching ended,elephants with tusks were more likely to survive because they could use their tusks to find . In this scene from the documentary Explorer: Warlords of Ivory, a screener at Tanzanias airport accuses Bryan Christy of smuggling. During the civil war between 1977 to 1992, poachers sold the ivory to finance the conflict, including buying arms and ammunition. Bill McQuay now works as a sound engineer with the National Public Radio - National Geographic Society Radio Expeditions Sound Collection at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library. only . That's so terrible! I didn't go looking for this. At the sound of a twig cracking or the detection of an unexpected scent on the wind, a ranger in front of me, Agoyo Mbikoyo, signals caution, and I drop with the team into a collective crouch and wait silently. We would follow them using Google Earth. Some 30,000 African elephants die each year at the hands of poachers to satisfy the global demand for ivory. After Lucienne Lanziwas husband died in an LRA attack on Garamba, she got a modest stipend. Fish and Wildlife Service. I agree elephants are my favourite animals and it's unfair elephants don't cut of our noses or massively nearly ruin our species so why should we do the same to them. That's just something to think about and consider really because it's absolutely RIDICULOUS that any animal should have to go through that. By 1913, the African elephant population had dropped to an estimated 10 million. When he returns hours later, he has three chicken dinners and several bottles of beer, paid for by the police chief. These soldiers are tasked with helping rangers fight poachers and armed groups like theLRA. Then youre just the man for me.. When the tortoise Lonesome George, emblem of the Galpagos Islands, died, it was Dante who was tasked with restoring him. According to data stored in a GPS unit taken off the body of LRA commander Vincent Binany Okumu, who was killed in a 2013 firefight with African Union forces on his return from poaching in Garamba, this village is on the path of ivory headed to Konys base inDarfur. Year after year, the path to many of the biggest, most horrific elephant killings traces back to Sudan, which has no elephants left but gives comfort to foreign-born poacher-terrorists and is home to the janjaweed and other Sudanese cross-continental marauders. But we also discovered field biologist Andrea Turkalo, who's now a conservation scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society. They all report to him, they all obey him. Normally both male and female African elephants have tusks, which are really a pair of massive teeth. Meanwhile, as leaders in Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S. strategize about how to stop the ever expanding network of international terrorist organizations, somewhere in Africa a park ranger stands his post, holding an AK-47 and a handful of bullets, manning the front line for all of us. So we Bill McQuay and Chris Joyce, who've worked together on stories from the mountains of China to the copper mines of Michigan recently decided to go see Turkalo and find out what happened. Researchers looked at why female elephants in Gorongosa national park in Mozambique were frequently born without tusks, and found that the animals were in effect genetically engineered by mass . Learn more about the Explorer series. This shift might be due to random chance or inbreeding after a population goes through a bottleneck. But a computer simulation, which examined the probability of tusked and tuskless females surviving the war, suggested the increase in tuskless females was far more likely to have resulted from selection, the team reports online today in Science. When I ask, How many of you have been kidnapped by the LRA?I understand why. After months of tinkering, Kermeens final bespoke ivory-tracking device arrives in the mail. Although the adaptation comes with a pricean associated genetic mutation kills male elephants before they're bornthe emerging trait may have helped save the population. "You know, a lot of the NGOs, we just cut and run," she tells us matter-of-factly. Father Ernest Sugule, who ministers to the village, tells me that many children in his diocese have seen family members killed by the Lords Resistance Army, or LRA, the Ugandan rebel group led by Joseph Kony, one of Africas most wanted terrorists. Its easier to live with things, she says. A female forest elephant charges, in Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve in the Central African Republic. Around us stroll Ugandan army soldiers, who make up the entire African Union contingent based in Obo and are committed to finding and killing Kony. Im a problem solver., I laugh. The LRA sells to the Sudan Armed Forces, Onen said. A pilot study published this year showed that the presence of a beehive fence reduced the odds of an elephant crossing the river by 95%. Now it was rare to see 250 in aherd. When the American Museum of Natural History wanted to update the hall of North American mammals, taxidermist George Dante got the call. But in central Africa, as I learned firsthand, something more sinister is driving the killing: Militias and terrorist groups funded in part by ivory are poaching elephants, often outside their home countries, and even hiding inside national parks. Konys force has declined from a peak of 2,700 combatants in 1999 to an estimated 150 to 250 core fighters today. Will they go north, the most violent ivory path on the African continent? We were expecting to find an amazing new world of sound to record, and the experience lived up to its reputation the insects, the tropical downpours, and of course the cacophony of the elephants themselves. From Garamba, Kony signaled his desire for peace with Uganda, sending emissaries to neutral Juba, in southern Sudan, to negotiate with Ugandan officials while he and his men lived unmolested in and around the park, protected by a cease-fire agreement. The family of Idriss Adoum (second from left) tracked one suspect to Sudan. Congolese soldiers undergo training by Mathieu Eckel of African Parks, an NGO that manages Garamba National Park with the DRCs parks authority. Like much of the world, George Dante knows that the African elephant is under siege. We meet over Skype. Elephants without tusks were normally left alone by hunters, so this made it more likely they would breed and pass on the tuskless trait to their children. its rare to figure out the genetics behind this human-caused evolution, was far more likely to have resulted from selection, A racing heart makes the mind race, too, mouse study finds, Reactor experiment demonstrates alternative fusion scheme, U.K. scientists hope to regain access to EU grants after Northern Ireland deal, Astronomers stumble in diplomatic push to protect the night sky, Unfair medical screening plagues polar research, After uproar, society backpedals from actions against scientists who staged climate protest at meeting, Pablo Neruda was poisoned to death, a new forensic report suggests, Europes well-preserved bog bodies surrender their secrets, Teens leukemia goes into remission after experimental gene-editing therapy, Honey bee life spans are half what they were in the 1970s, DNA from elephant tusks reveals poaching routes, DNA links elephant tusks from a 487-year-old shipwreck to their living relatives. CORNISH: The upshot, which they published this week in the journal Science, is that females without tusks are pretty likely to have tuskless babies, which is why the trait was becoming so prevalent. To me, it seems reasonable to think that the radiomans defection might have slowed the progress of the 25 elephants tusks headed to Kony. I need Schreger lines too, George, I say, referring to the cross-hatching on the butt of a sawn tusk that looks like growth rings of a tree trunk. The poachers opened fire, killing five rangers. When theyre abducted, theyre very young, and theyre forced to do horrible things. Jensen, who was executive producer of the series, and Alex Chadwick, chief correspondent, insisted on the highest quality sound recording to complement its reporting. It's run by a band of men who, if not exactly soldiers-of-fortune, certainly are trained warriors who can deal not just with poachers, but with civil war, too. Mozambiques civil war from 1977 to 1992 had a grim outcome for elephants: During that time, some 90% were killed for the ivory in their tusks, which were sold to finance the war. ". Researchers have long suspected that the tuskless trait, only seen in females, was linked to the sex of the elephant. The Rhodesian armed forces lacked the manpower to effectively protect its 1,300-kilometre (800 mi) border with Mozambique against entering ZANLA insurgents. Turkalo is now part of an extraordinary operation to protect the surviving forest elephants. It's called the Dzanga bai a clearing the size of several football fields that's rich in the mineralized mud that the elephants depend on. Thanks to stepped-up enforcement, the park hasnt lost an elephant to poachers since 2012. I order a satellite shot of their location from DigitalGlobe, a commercial vendor of space imagery, and ask for outside help interpreting it. MCCAMMON: But the number of tuskless elephants was multiplying in Mozambique during and after the country's decades-long civil war, which ended in 1992. After Sudanese poachers killed his ranger father, Adoum refused diya, a traditional community payment. Their path is consistent with the route Konys defectors tell me ivory takes on the way to the warlords Kafia Kingi base. Garamba is managed through a partnership between the DRCs wildlife department and African Parks, a group based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Michael Onen, the defector from Konys army, told me that the LRA and the janjaweed had battled over ivory, with one group robbing the other, and that it was the janjaweeds success in trading ivory that originally gave Kony the idea to start killing elephants. Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. Zakoumas Mamba Team 1 antipoaching unit includes driver Issa Adoum (brown shirt). for their tusks. (Special thanks to the National Public Radio - National Geographic Society Radio Expeditions Sound Collection at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, for sharing the audio.). That evening, they floated by a village. According to Col. Mike Kabango, of the African Union forces, the image shows a large tent and two smaller ones; to Ryan Stage, a remote-sensing specialist in Colorado, it shows a large truck and two small tents. Six antipoaching rangers and their cook, the entirety of the Hippotrague (French for roan antelope) unit, were awake, dressed in camouflage uniforms, and preparing for morning prayersdevoted even in the darkness. In the morning, after officials from Tanzanias Wildlife Division and the U.S. Embassy arrive, Im released. CORNISH: So he made some calls and assembled a team. So 50% of her daughters will be tusked. He went first to Sudan, initiating a pattern of border-hopping that continues to make him difficult to track. The last time an elephant was recorded killed by a poacher in Mozambique's Niassa Reserve was May 17, 2018, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society, a New York -based nonprofit that helps the Mozambican government manage the national reserve. a. percentage of elephants killed . I arrive at what amounts to the park rangers northern front, an outpost vulnerable both to Sudanese poachers and Konys army. In 2002, NPR host and correspondent Alex Chadwick and sound engineer Bill McQuay went to central Africa to see and gather sound from the rare forest elephants of the Dzanga bai. The soldiers killed the elephants. Instead of signing a peace agreement, Kony had his peace negotiator executed. An adviser to the Ugandan military rejects the helicopter accusation, and suggests that the elephants might have been shot in the top of the head after they were down. They have flashbacks. Its not a secret to anyone that Konys in Sudan, says the State Departments Marty Regan. By 1979, there were only 1.3 million elephants left. When in 2008 the Wildlife Conservation Society introduced a surveillance airplane, poaching declined, but Sudanese marauders adapted, returning in hit squads of under six men, who infiltrated from outside the park on one-day hunts. His wife, abducted later, was killed. Five of the worlds least stable nations, as ranked by the Washington, D.C.-based organization the Fund for Peace, are home to people who travel to other countries to kill elephants. It needs to be durable and small enough to fit inside the cavities George Dante would make in the blocks of resin and lead that formed the tusks. During the failed peace talks with Uganda, while Kony hid in Garamba from 2006 to 2008, Onen had been assigned to Konys lead peace negotiator, Vincent Otti. "I could hear the call and say, 'Yeah, that's a juvenile being pushed out of a hole by its mother; it's protesting.' Today, poaching has stopped in Gorongosa, and the elephant population is recovering. The men of the Hippotrague unit assumed that after the previous teams raid, the poachers had all fled home. In village after village along the road between Father Sugules church and what is now South Sudan, I meet Kony victims who describe being fed elephant meat and how, after elephants were killed, militants took the ivory away. Turkalo's pretty famous in the world of elephant research, as one of the first to study forest elephants. Calculate the percentages of the illegally killed elephants between 2007 and 2013 represented by each group of elephants in Question 3. Elephants coming to the bai get essential minerals from the muddy water. It's run by a band of men who, if not exactly soldiers-of-fortune, certainly are trained warriors. But after Otti left Garamba to participate in the peace talks, Kony began killing elephants for ivory. The relatives of murdered Zakouma ranger Idriss Adoum tracked one of the alleged Heban hill poachers to Sudan and arranged to have him brought back to Chad to stand trial. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Large-tusked elephants in Gorongosa were killed for their ivory, which was sold to buy arms and ammunition. "There's such a blizzard of depressing news about biodiversity and humans in the environment and I think it's important to emphasise that there are some bright spots in that picture. Here a ranger unit is permanently deployed to protect one of the parks most important assets: a radio tower that was being built. Do we really need to sell ivory tusks in the world just to make money? ", They were the Seleka the Muslim rebels who had overthrown the national government in the spring of 2013. During the summer Konys soldiers had killed 25 elephants in Garamba, and they were on their way back to Kony carrying the ivory. I will use his tusks to hunt the people who kill elephants and to learn what roads their ivory plunder follows, which ports it leaves, what ships it travels on, what cities and countries it transits, and where it ends up. Despite Sudans role as a safe haven for groups known to traffic ivory, such as the LRA, janjaweed, and other poaching gangs, the country has drawn limited official attention as a poaching state. Since the 1980s, and beginning in Uganda, Konys minions are alleged to have killed tens of thousands of people, slicing the lips, ears, and breasts off women, raping children and women, chopping off the feet of those caught riding bicycles, and kidnapping young boys to create an army of child soldiers who themselves grow into killers. There, Onen says, Konys men trade ivory with the Sudanese military for salt, sugar, and arms. Researchers are still trying to pinpoint all the genetics that underpin . Now its under siege for its ivory, mainly by rogue soldiers from national armies and by the terrorist group the Lords Resistance Army (LRA). EVERY SINGLE animal on this planet is special and this doesn't happen to monkeys or crocodiles or birds does it? Chad. The reason why the soldiers killed the elephants was to gain ammunition and arms from the money received after selling their ivory. It was the rainy season, and the rangers, like the elephants they were guarding, had left the park for higher ground. CORNISH: That's Fanie Pelletier, a wildlife biologist in Canada who wasn't involved in the work. ", World Elephant Day: Ten facts about amazing elephants, Elephants and the ivory trade: The crisis in Africa, Safer Internet Day: Top tips for when you're online, Rescue services helping as big quake hits Turkey and Syria, We speak to Junior Bake Off champion about winning the show. It was several weeks after that, that she heard that poachers taking advantage of the chaos in the country had invaded the bai. Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. A booming Chinese middle class with an insatiable taste for ivory, crippling poverty in Africa, weak and corrupt law enforcement, and more ways than ever to kill an elephant have created a perfect storm. Money is available to outfit the rangers with better equipment, but buying new weapons requires formal approval of the Congolese army, something Froment has been unable to get. In three weeks Konys brutes killed more than 800 people and kidnapped more than 160 children. This is the long shadow of that human imprint that is going to take generations to erase, Pringle says. No one has. "This time they covered most of country," she says, "pillage, rape and kill. Using Kermeens technology, he could adjust how many times a day they tried to communicate with a satellite via the Internet. Among the recent casualties was a group of rare forest elephants in the Central African Republic. Subscribe to News from Science for full access to breaking news and analysis on research and science policy. From Garamba, Kony sent an exploratory team to Darfur to look into forging a new relationship with the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), who had supported him against Uganda, hoping to exchange ivory for rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons. It was thanks largely to efforts by the group Invisible Children and its video Kony 2012 that Kony became a household name in the West. Ivory shops in Khartoum advertise in English and Chinese as well as Arabic. Fifty percent of her sons will be tusked, but that other 50% would die. Fifty percent will be tuskless. Seven surgeries later shes forgiven them. But that's not the end of the story. 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