Rangers practice their riding skills at Zakouma National Park, in Chad. His wife, abducted later, was killed. In May 2013 Seleka-backed Sudanese poachers attacked Dzanga Bai, an elephant oasis in Dzanga-Ndoki National Park of southwest CAR, killing 26 elephants. hide caption. In Mozambique, past hunting pressure led to an increase of . According to Cline Sissler-Bienvenu, Francophone Africa director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, who led a group into the park after the slaughter, the poachers were most likely from Darfurs Rizeigat tribal group, with ties to the janjaweedthe violent, Sudanese-government-backed militias that have committed atrocities in Darfur. Theyre looting communities, enslaving people, and killing park rangers who get in their way. He wasnt contrite. a. percentage of elephants killed . FANIE PELLETIER: It's one of the most detailed example of how human activity can influence the genes of a population. As long-ranging animals, they shape vast swaths of wildlands, stomping and chomping through them, sparring with trees, rearranging foliage. What can be done to help save the elephants? He and his colleagues analyzed videos, taken before the civil war, of elephants in the park. Otti was furious, Onen says. To test ivory, dealers will scratch a tusk with a knife or hold a lighter under it; ivory is a tooth and wont melt. It consists of a battery capable of lasting more than a year, a GPS receiver, an Iridium satellite transceiver, and a temperature sensor. Three more are classified as of importance to watch: Angola, Cambodia, and Laos. A study in Gorongosa revealed that while male elephants did have tusks but almost 50% of female elephants above the age of 20 did not. 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. Ive met more than a thousand children who have been abducted, he says as we talk inside his church in the nearby town of Dungu. "They recognize each other's voices," she told us in 2002, "just like women recognize their babies' cries. MCCAMMON: Campbell-Staton and his team worked with local researchers who had tracked elephants for decades. Kiev's troops have big Nazi problem - ex-US soldier who escaped Ukraine; DESTRUCTION OF OUR CULTURE HAS SUCCEEDED; Most Ukrainian Soldiers On Bakhmut Front-Line Killed 'Within 4 Hours' URGENT: mRNAs jabs may have caused tens of millions of serious new health problems worldwide, a huge peer-reviewed study shows Im not an animal lover, he snaps. After visiting Garamba, I arrange with a confidential source to put my tusks into the black market near Mboki, a small village in CAR midway between Garamba and Sudan that has been the target of attacks by Konys army and where some people who have escaped from Kony have found safety. "I don't know which ones they killed," she replies. In March 2006 he fled for the DRC and set up camp in Garamba National Park, then home to some 4,000 elephants. A young elephant splashes in a stream that runs through the bai. Another potential knock-on is changes to the broader landscape, as the study has revealed that tusked and tuskless animals eat different plants. Ivory operates as a savings account for Kony, says Marty Regan, of the U.S. State Departments Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. Meanwhile, according to Onen, Konys men hid ivory by burying it in the ground or submerging it in rivers. HOW MANY TIMES ?? 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. To enjoy the CBBC Newsround website at its best you will need to have JavaScript turned on. 3. Once the war and poaching ended,elephants with tusks were more likely to survive because they could use their tusks to find . During a civil war in the country, that lasted from 1977 to 1992, up to 90% of Mozambique's elephant population was killed, mainly for their ivory tusks. Froment uses the word war to describe the fight Garambas 150 rangers are in with poachers. That's painful to imagine, especially for anyone who's had the chance to watch these animals. I spend a night in police custody, where Im given a desk to sleep on. The Ugandan military finally attacked Konys Garamba camps in late 2008. The LRA sells to the Sudan Armed Forces, Onen said. "So we heard this 'rat-a-tat-tat.' 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. During the Mozambican Civil War from 1977 to 1992, humans killed so many elephants for their lucrative ivory that the animals seem to have evolved in the space of a generation. Rogue militias and army soldiers from the DRC, Sudan, and South Sudan are slaughtering elephants in the park. 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. Professor Robert Pringle of Princeton University said: "Tusklessness might be advantageous during a war, but that comes at a cost.". In Songo the tusks are held for three days in what looks like a clearing outside town. 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. Among the recent casualties was a group of rare forest elephants in the Central African Republic. 4. And I was like, ooh, what's this? Elephants gather in the Dzanga bai, a forest clearing the size of several football fields. National Geographic television producer J.J.Kelley takes the floor in the waiting area. Jensen, who was executive producer of the series, and Alex Chadwick, chief correspondent, insisted on the highest quality sound recording to complement its reporting. 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. Subscribe to News from Science for full access to breaking news and analysis on research and science policy. But she knew she had to leave; she's a researcher for a non-governmental wildlife organization, not some kind of soldier-of-fortune. ", They were the Seleka the Muslim rebels who had overthrown the national government in the spring of 2013. 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. But last year at the bai, she says, she feared for her life. TEXT EDITOR: Oliver Payne. In 2012 as many as a hundred Sudanese and Chadian poachers on horseback rode across central Africa into Cameroons Bouba Ndjidah National Park. Geli Oh perks up at the word elephant. She saw many elephants in Garamba National Park, she says, which is where the LRA took her. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. Calculate the percentages of the illegally killed elephants between 2007 and 2013 represented by each group of elephants in Question 3. For example, tuskless motherswho would have had one copy of the dominant tuskless gene, from their own mothershad the same number of daughters with and without tusks. DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT: Kevin DiCesare, Joel Fiser, Jaime Hritsik, Brian Jacobs. That members of the Sudanese military trade arms for ivory with the LRA raises questions about the highest levels of Sudans government. Next, researchers wanted to pin down the mechanism of inheritance for tusklessness. 75/129 = 58.1%. I unzip my suitcase to expose two fake tusks and hand him letters from the U.S. They can get what they want today, he said, and keep it there for two, three, or even more than five years.. " Turkalo and the other women stopped their boat, afraid they'd be fired on if they kept going. Albert Roca, a geneticist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, calls the shift striking in its speedand because it is driven by people. 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. Dzanga Baialso known as the village of elephantsis a mineral-rich mudhole where the animalscongregate. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Some elephant populations seem to be missing their tusks. Researchers in Mozambique found a . Armed groups help fund operations by smuggling elephant ivory. ", "We got into a boat; we went downriver," Turkalo says. In 1994 Kony left Uganda and took his murderous gang on the road. Using Kermeens technology, he could adjust how many times a day they tried to communicate with a satellite via the Internet. These LRA defectorsall abducted as children and pressed into servicenow fight for the Ugandan military. It was used to make combs, pool balls, knick-knacks, and even piano keys. Instead of being made a soldier, he was designated a signalera radioman privy to Konys secret communications. 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. Soumaine Abdoulaye Issa had been in Darfur, he told a team of African Parks investigators, when he heard about an elephant poaching mission to Chad led by a member of the Sudan Armed Forces. 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. I arrive at what amounts to the park rangers northern front, an outpost vulnerable both to Sudanese poachers and Konys army. Onen had been part of an LRA poaching operation in Garamba consisting of 41 fighters, including Konys son Salim. So I said to myself, 'I better go into a very passive mode.' They shift a few miles. But it failed to rout Kony or his leadership. Andrea Turkalo/The Elephant Listening Project, Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. Kony is a former Roman Catholic altar boy whose stated mission is to overthrow the Ugandan government on behalf of the Acholi people of northern Uganda, and to rule the country according to his version of the Ten Commandments. They used Historical records to collect height (estimated to the shoulder), tusk length, and tusk circumference from approximately 600 elephants that were culled in Tsavo East National Park (Kenya) and Mkomazi National Park (Tanzania) between 1966 and 1968. Andrea Turkalo sketched the ears and other details of the elephants she studied to help identify them. The three of us eat together (the police chief, a Muslim, leaves the beer to us). Sudan is also a well-documented supplier of ivory to Egypt and is the recipient of substantial Chinese infrastructure investment, which typically comes with Chinese workers, a source of ivory smuggling in many parts of Africa. An estimated 25,000 elephants are killed every year in Africa for their tusks, double the number killed in 2007. As Somalia is to piracy, Sudan has become to elephant poaching. "We were all women five women." 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. When humans hunt, they can cause their quarry to evolve by targeting individuals with particular traits, like big fish or sheep with hefty horns. So why elephants? Turkalo is now part of an extraordinary operation to protect the surviving forest elephants. It was reassuring to find the Tanzanian law enforcers so vigilant, because the country is plagued by perhaps the worst elephant poaching in Africa, and corruption is rife. So far theyve traveled 600 miles from jungle to desert in just under two months. Researchers took blood samples from elephants in order to sequence their genomes. Such a biased sex ratio would be expected with a recessive gene that kills males when they inherit it. The U.S. State Department named Kony a specially designated global terrorist in 2008, and the African Union has designated the LRA a terrorist organization. VIDEO: J.J. Kelley, NG Studios. He sits on a plastic chair opposite me in a clearing at the African Union forces base in Obo, in the southeastern corner of CAR, where he is in custody. Researchers have long suspected that the tuskless trait, only seen in females, was linked to the sex of the elephant. 4. 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. Theyre in a place 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the ambient temperature, so perhaps theyve been buried in the backyard. Their path is consistent with the route Konys defectors tell me ivory takes on the way to the warlords Kafia Kingi base. Konys army had arrived in Garamba in 2006 with little ammunition left to continue its war, Onen tells me. Mostup to 3,000were poached from 2005 to 2008. SHANE CAMPBELL-STATON: The Howard Hughes Medical Institute - they had this video that was called "The Tuskless Elephants Of Gorongosa." 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. But time is stalking our team: Months later, on April 25, 2015, while on patrol, the ranger who led me into Garamba, Agoyo Mbikoyo, was shot and killed by a gang of poachers. As we talk over my design needs, Dantes brown eyes sparkle like a boys on Christmas morning. Garamba is a crucible within a crucible, a park under siege in a country often in civil war in a region that has nearly forgotten peace. His control is absolute.. When I ask, How many of you have been kidnapped by the LRA?I understand why. "You know, a lot of the NGOs, we just cut and run," she tells us matter-of-factly. He went first to Sudan, initiating a pattern of border-hopping that continues to make him difficult to track. In 1978, the elephant was listed as threatened under the United States' Endangered Species Act. "I heard they were on their way. Outnumbered and ill equipped, theyre manning the front line in a violent battle that affects us all. 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%. Then youre just the man for me.. They say the more elephants they kill, the more ivory they get.. The poaching issue is a governance issue, Froment says. 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. During the summer Konys soldiers had killed 25 elephants in Garamba, and they were on their way back to Kony carrying the ivory. It was supposed to be a short posting, but he saw too much death to leave. Six years later, on October 25, 2014, Onen tells me, his poaching mission to Garamba was scheduled to deliver its ivory to Kony in Sudan. It was the rainy season, and the rangers, like the elephants they were guarding, had left the park for higher ground. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. During the civil war between 1977 to 1992, poachers sold the ivory to finance the conflict, including buying arms and ammunition. 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.. Soldiers killed elephants for their ivory tusks, which were extremely valuable. And someoneits unclear whois believed to be killing elephants from helicopters, as evidenced by bullet holes in the tops of skulls and the removal of tusks by what can only be chain saws. 5. But Dante, who is one of the worlds most respected taxidermists, has never done what Im asking him to do. That evening, they floated by a village. EVERY SINGLE animal on this planet is special and this doesn't happen to monkeys or crocodiles or birds does it? Campbell-Staton points out that other species in Gorongosa rely on elephants having tusks to dig up holes for water and strip bark from trees. Track the GPS unit in an interactive map. It also raises many questions. All creatures should live in harmony! The rangers also recovered a stamped Sudanese army leave slip granting three soldiers permission to travel from Darfur to a town near the Chadian border. Its not clear why a mutated version of AMELXwhich is located on the x chromosomewould be fatal to males, but researchers suspect one or more nearby genes come along for the ride. In humans, a mutated version of AMELX is linked to male death before birth; in females, that version stunts the growth of the upper incisors, the same teeth that become tusks in elephants. a. percentage of elephants killed only for their meat 19/129 = 14.7% b. percentage of elephants killed only for their tusks 75/129 = 58.1% c. percentage of elephants killed for both their tusks and meat 27/129 = 20.9% 5. I wonder if Konys men are out there now. only . The soldiers embrace Onen as one of their own, and in fundamental ways he is. Some 30,000 African elephants die each year at the hands of poachers to satisfy the global demand for ivory. It's nothing extraordinary for humans. On our patrol we dont encounter any poachers or rebel groups. 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. The rangers Im going out with have each been allocated a handful of rounds for old and unreliable AK-47s, most of them seized from poachers. At least 26 elephants were massacred at the Dzanga Bai in the Central African Republic in the spring of 2013. Issa claimed he was merely a lookout, not a poacher. Learn more about the Explorer series. Weve heard he went to Seleka, Idriss Adoums son Issa tells me, referring to the violent rebel coalition that overthrew the CAR government on March 24, 2013. 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. Ugandan forces killed Binany in 2013 and recovered thediary. Widows now get a sum equal to six years of a rangers salary. 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. Diya is for accidents, he says. Professor Pringle said it was possible to reverse this trait over time as long as work to recover elephant populations from the brink of extinction continues. Our next story begins in a place many of us are familiar with - up awake, watching a YouTube video at 3 in the morning. The air strike, dubbed Operation Lightning Thunder, included support from the DRC, southern Sudan, and the U.S. 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. This story launches the National Geographic Societys Special Investigations Unit, which will report on wildlife crimes. This project was made possible by a grant from The WoodtigerFund. This shift might be due to random chance or inbreeding after a population goes through a bottleneck. 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. 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. They were relieving a ranger team that had raided a Sudanese poachers camp three weeks before and seized more than a thousand rounds of ammunition; mobile phones holding photographs of bloated, dead elephants; a satellite phone with a solar panel charger; two elephant tusks; a pair of camouflage pants; and a uniform with the insignia of Abu TiraSudans notorious Central Reserve Police, alleged to have committed mass killings, assaults, and rapes in Darfur. These soldiers are tasked with helping rangers fight poachers and armed groups like theLRA. That's so terrible! Please make a tax-deductible gift today. If true, Soumaine Issa will find poachers working with Seleka. 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. He asks for water for me and is led out of the building. 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. These jumbo foragers are masterful engineers of their surroundings. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. The operation was designed by Kony himself, Onen says. Female elephants do use their tusks, but female elephants in Mozambique are doing just fine without them, according to Long. Although the adaptation comes with a pricean associated genetic mutation kills male elephants before theyre bornthe emerging trait may have helped save the population. 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. 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. b. percentage of elephants killed . She turned her life around to be near them, settling in a rough camp in the rainforest and building an observation platform where she could safely watch the animals that congregate there. In the morning, after officials from Tanzanias Wildlife Division and the U.S. Embassy arrive, Im released. A small proportion of females . Despite their lack of tusks, it's often the females who can be seen defending the herd. Between April 25 and June 17, poachers killed two Garamba rangers and two army officers assisting with patrols. It was several weeks after that, that she heard that poachers taking advantage of the chaos in the country had invaded the bai. "When it gets bad we leave.". PRODUCER: Janey Adams. Now its under siege for its ivory, mainly by rogue soldiers from national armies and by the terrorist group the Lords Resistance Army (LRA). This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Researchers at the bai learned to identify individual elephants by the shape and characteristics of their ears. After Zakoumas rangers destroyed their camp and confiscated their equipment, the poachers were unable to return to Sudan, so three weeks later they went back to Heban hill and attacked the Hippotrague unit. Together we can make a difference. See the article in its original context from. Ive flown from Garamba park headquarters to a dirt airstrip deep inside the park to join an antipoaching patrol. Most illegal ivory goes to China, where a pair of ivory chopsticks can bring more than a thousand dollars and carved tusks sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's just something to think about and consider really because it's absolutely RIDICULOUS that any animal should have to go through that. Back in 1969 Gorongosa National Park was home to over 2200 elephants, but now there is just over 700 in the park. In this scene from the documentary Explorer: Warlords of Ivory, Bryan Christy presents world-renowned taxidermist George Dante with a new challenge: creating a completely convincing fake elephant tusk. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. Now it was rare to see 250 in aherd. From March 2014 to March 2015, Garambas rangers recorded 31 contacts with armed poachers, more than half of whom were with groups traveling south from the direction of South Sudan and Sudan. During a civil war in the country, that lasted from 1977 to 1992, up to 90% of Mozambique's elephant population was killed, mainly for their ivory tusks. 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. The study is extremely thorough and ticks off all the boxes, Roca says. Now, researchers report this intense hunting dramatically altered a major elephant population there, favoring female elephants born without tusks. 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. We plunge eight hours through elephant grass so tall and thick its possible to get lost just 20 feet from the man in front of youdown grass ravines, up hills exposed to the enemy, across a murky, waist-deep pond. The park has lost all its rhinos to poaching for their horns. "This time they covered most of country," she says, "pillage, rape and kill. East Africa is now ground zero for much of the poaching.