Elephants are starting to evolve without tusks as poaching becomes more rampant.
Elephants use their tusks in their daily lives to lift and carry items, break down barriers, fight, and more. However, more and more female elephants in Mozambique‘s Gorongosa National Park have been born without their tusks. Scientists say this is an evolutionary response to the violent poaching that has taken place in the country.
During Mozambique’s civil war, which lasted 15 years, poachers would remove the ivory tusks from elephants. The poaching of tusks increased by more than threefold between 1972 and 2000. And during that time, the population of elephants dropped from 2,000 to 250.
“During the war, Gorongosa was essentially the geographic center of the conflict,” Ryan Long, an associate professor of wildlife sciences at the University of Idaho, told CNN. “As a result, there were large numbers of soldiers in the area and a lot of associated motivation… to kill elephants and sell the ivory to purchase arms and ammunition. The resulting level of poaching was very intense.”
Long added on to that, saying, “Females have 2 X chromosomes. In tuskless females, one of those chromosomes is ‘normal’ and the other contains the deleted information.”
He continued: “When a tuskless female conceives a male offspring, that male has a 50/50 shot of receiving the affected X-chromosome from its mother. If it receives the ‘normal’ chromosome then it will survive and be born with the necessary genetic information to produce tusks.”
