Elephants have evolved to be tuskless in response to ivory poaching, study finds.
During the conflict from 1977 to 1992, fighters on both sides slaughtered elephants for ivory to finance war efforts. In the region that’s now Gorongosa National Park, around 90 percent of the elephants were killed.
After the war, those tuskless surviving females passed on their genes with expected, as well as surprising, results. About half their daughters were tuskless. More perplexing, two-thirds of their offspring were female. Researchers in Mozambique, including biologists Dominique Goncalves and Joyce Poole, observed the national park’s roughly 800 elephants over several years to create a catalogue of mothers and offspring.
In Gorongosa, the team collected blood samples from seven tusked and 11 tuskless female elephants, then analyzed their DNA for differences. “When mothers pass it on, we think the sons likely die early in development, a miscarriage,” said Brian Arnold, a co-author and evolutionary biologist at Princeton.
Most people think of evolution as something that proceeds slowly, but humans can hit the accelerator.
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