And I gotta find a way to get that shine, Dante says, referring to the gloss a clean elephant tusk has. South Sudan. Thousands of elephants die each year so that their tusks can be carved into religious objects. MCCAMMON: Those changes can ripple through ecosystems. When theyre abducted, theyre very young, and theyre forced to do horrible things. The White Elephant symbolizes distinctive things for both the man and Jig. ", But Turkalo's 22 years with those elephants came to a disastrous end last year, when civil war in the republic found its way to the Dzanga bai. Elephant ivory is a key source of funding for armed groups in central Africa . Embattled park rangers are often the only defense for wildlife andvillagers. It was several weeks after that, that she heard that poachers taking advantage of the chaos in the country had invaded the bai. That evening, they floated by a village. He and his colleagues analyzed videos, taken before the civil war, of elephants in the park. Congos own soldiers threaten the parks southern border, and villagers around the park sometimes poach elephants too. Ivory shops in Khartoum advertise in English and Chinese as well as Arabic. The tension broke. Poaching has been curbed in Chads Zakouma National Park, but rebuilding the parks herd, now at 450, will take years. Its not a secret to anyone that Konys in Sudan, says the State Departments Marty Regan. She and other scientists also recorded their calls. Ivory operates as a savings account for Kony, says Marty Regan, of the U.S. State Departments Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. Father Sugule introduces me to three young girls, recent LRA kidnapping victims, who are sitting on a wooden bench in his church. Such a biased sex ratio would be expected with a recessive gene that kills males when they inherit it. ", Andrea Turkalo sketched the ears and other details of the elephants she studied to help identify them. But Dante, who is one of the worlds most respected taxidermists, has never done what Im asking him to do. During the summer Konys soldiers had killed 25 elephants in Garamba, and they were on their way back to Kony carrying the ivory. 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. Professor Robert Pringle of Princeton University said: "Tusklessness might be advantageous during a war, but that comes at a cost.". The women pushed on downriver. Today, poaching has stopped in Gorongosa, and the elephant population is recovering. 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. Theyre in a place 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the ambient temperature, so perhaps theyve been buried in the backyard. Geli Oh, 16, spent longer with Konys army than her two friendstwo and a half terrible years. 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 clearly would rather be back in Africa than in a coffee house in Rhode Island. 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. Its hissanctuary.. Our airport incident was one of many hiccups with the artificial tusks. Diya is for accidents, he says. When he shows up, he picks up a tusk and runs his finger over the butt end. This project was made possible by a grant from The WoodtigerFund. 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. 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. "I can never get too emotionally attached to things there," she says of central Africa, "because otherwise you set yourself up for a lot of disappointment. By skewing their evolution, humans fiddle with elephants' role in the ecosystem too. The UN estimated that the massacre displaced more than a hundred thousand Congolese and Sudanese. Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. Copyright 2021 NPR. The Central African Republic was peaceful back then. But Onen got his way. Track the GPS unit in an interactive map. for their tusks. 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. During the civil war between 1977 to 1992, poachers sold the ivory to finance the conflict, including buying arms and ammunition. But last year at the bai, she says, she feared for her life. In fact, she tells us, two weeks later she went back to the bai something we found pretty astonishing given the circumstances of the civil war. This find suggests the mutation for tusklessness may kill male elephants, per the New York Times. When the American Museum of Natural History wanted to update the hall of North American mammals, taxidermist George Dante got the call. In 2009 Bashir became the worlds first sitting head of state indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity. "The people on the shore, they started discharging their automatic weapons in the air," she remembers. If true, Soumaine Issa will find poachers working with Seleka. They had nowhere to run." Those looking at the tusks think Im an ivory trafficker. In June the Tanzanian government announced that the country has lost 60 percent of its elephants in the past five years, down from 110,000 to fewer than 44,000. The teams cook, also wounded, struggled 11 miles to get help. ", 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. Locals, including poor villagers and unpaid park rangers, are killing elephants for casha risk theyre willing to take because even if theyre caught, the penalties are often negligible. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Large-tusked elephants in Gorongosa were killed for their ivory, which was sold to buy arms and ammunition. There were armed combatants roaming the countryside. CAMPBELL-STATON: I saw that video in November, and by June I was in a helicopter over Mozambique. Dzanga Baialso known as the village of elephantsis a mineral-rich mudhole where the animalscongregate. Elephants without tusks were normally. Andrea says all she was able to rescue were electronic copies of her research data. In a public square in Am Timan, shortly before his trial, he shouted, I know who betrayed me! My interpretation, says Jean Marc Froment, then director of the park, is that the Ugandan military is conducting operations inside Garamba and at the same time taking some ivory. But, he adds, the poachers could be SPLA, which uses the same type of helicopter seen over the park. 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. CORNISH: That's Fanie Pelletier, a wildlife biologist in Canada who wasn't involved in the work. Zakoumas Mamba Team 1 antipoaching unit includes driver Issa Adoum (brown shirt). He designed a GPS tracker that the U.S. Geological Survey embedded in live Burmese pythons to monitor the invasive snakes in the Florida Everglades. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. 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. Rogue militias and army soldiers from the DRC, Sudan, and South Sudan are slaughtering elephants in the park. hide caption, "We didn't know anything about (the forest elephants) in terms of their social structure, numbers, genetics, communication," Turkalo explained back in 2002 when the NPR team visited. The poaching issue is a governance issue, Froment says. As of this writing, my artificial tusks sent out their last communication from a Sudanese town called Ed Daein, 500 miles southwest of Khartoum. It was supposed to be a short posting, but he saw too much death to leave. Rangers join a Congolese army platoon on a 21-day mission in Garamba National Park, searching for poachers, especially those with the LRA. Female elephants do use their tusks, but female elephants in Mozambique are doing just fine without them, according to Long. PRODUCER: Janey Adams. One possibility is that surges of intense hunting have occurred on and off in Gorongosa over millennia, letting the genes occasionally provide a benefit. Kafia Kingi is so widely recognized as a Kony hideout that in April 2013 a coalition of groups, including Invisible Children, the Enough Project, and the Resolve, issued a report called Hidden in Plain Sight: Sudans Harboring of the LRA in the Kafia Kingi Enclave, 2009-2013. LRA defectors I spoke with consistently placed the warlord in the Kafia Kingi area too. Since the 2008-09 attack by Konys soldiers, rangers have finished building a new headquarters and acquired two airplanes and a helicopter. 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. CAMPBELL-STATON: But then I realized that there wasn't actually a lot of empirical data about what the response was from, you know, what the genetic basis of the trait was. 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. They shift a few miles. As Somalia is to piracy, Sudan has become to elephant poaching. Such genes ought to disappear, Roca says, because females that lack them would have more offspring. Now it was rare to see 250 in aherd. Konys men jump back and forth across borders, hiding in countries where governance is weak. But it could take a long time for tusked females to become as common as they once were. A young elephant splashes in a stream that runs through the bai. I know which house theyre in: Using Google Earth, I see its light-blue roof on my screen. Turkalo had lived through civil strife before, but this time, she tells us, it was much worse. Onen had been part of an LRA poaching operation in Garamba consisting of 41 fighters, including Konys son Salim. Now, scientists say that drove some elephants to evolve tusklessness. In the criminal world, ivory operates as currency, so in a way Im asking Dante to print counterfeit money I canfollow. As we talk over my design needs, Dantes brown eyes sparkle like a boys on Christmas morning. I mean, I've been through a lot of poaching.". Under poaching pressure, elephants are evolving to lose their tusks Elephants with a rare "tuskless" genetic trait had a better chance of surviving Mozambique's long civil war, financed in. "As a result there were large numbers of soldiers in the area and a lot of associated. I arrive at what amounts to the park rangers northern front, an outpost vulnerable both to Sudanese poachers and Konys army. b. percentage of elephants killed . In Zimbabwe, a recent survey shows massive losses in some parks. So 50% of her daughters will be tusked. Or will they go nowhere, discovered before theyre moved and turned in by an honest person? 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. By Jake Buehler. 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. To her relief, the men turned out to be local. On January 2, 2009, the horror bled into Garambas headquarters, at Nagero, where Kony soldiers burned the park rangers main building, destroyed equipment, and killed at least eight rangers and staff members. While Dante set about embedding Kermeens tracker inside his tusk mold, a third team member, John Flaig, a specialist in near-space, balloon-based photographyimages taken from at least the height of spy planeswas preparing to monitor the tusks as they moved. DNA suggests that some of the ivory is from elephants killed in May 2013 at Dzanga Bai in CAR. 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 . And I was like, ooh, what's this? Widows now get a sum equal to six years of a rangers salary. Otti liked elephants, Onen recalled, and forbade their killing. This is a photocopy of the diary of the LRAs Lt. Col. Vincent Binany Okumu, who, defectors say, was in charge of ivory hunting in Garamba National Park. Halfway through our patrol, we come upon a clearing of burned grass beside the Kassi River, the site of a recent battle between Garamba rangers and SPLA poachers, in which, rangers tell me, they killed two poachers. Calculate the percentages of the illegally killed elephants between 2007 and 2013 represented by each group of elephants in Question 3. This is the long shadow of that human imprint that is going to take generations to erase, Pringle says. This limited the trade of some ivory, but trade still continued across the world. Sugule is the founder of a group that provides assistance to victims of Konys army. "They were terrified. In 1978, the elephant was listed as threatened under the United States' Endangered Species Act. These LRA defectorsall abducted as children and pressed into servicenow fight for the Ugandan military. 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. Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. A white elephant is a valuable item that has a rate that perhaps surpasses its usefulness. 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. In 2012 as many as a hundred Sudanese and Chadian poachers on horseback rode across central Africa into Cameroons Bouba Ndjidah National Park. A welcome sight returns to Zakouma: babies. When ivory poachers target elephants, the hunters can affect more than just animal numbers. After six hours on the dark river, they got to safety, to a campsite in the Congo. "When it gets bad we leave.". Seven surgeries later shes forgiven them. 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Their own families are afraid that theyre devils, or forever soldiers, who might kill them in the night. 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. We can't change the last bit we can shape the future. Once the war and poaching ended, elephants with tusks were more likely to survive because they could use their tusks to find water and food. FANIE PELLETIER: It's one of the most detailed example of how human activity can influence the genes of a population. To look for genes that might be involved, the team took blood from 18 female elephants in the park and sequenced their genomes. She had gone to Africa to do aid work, but was drawn to the intricate lives of these elephants. Or possibly even shown up in illegal ivorys biggest consuming country:China. We meet in a busy coffee shop full of students from nearby Brown University. Hed grown up not far from Garamba at a time when it was possible to fly over the park and see 5,000 elephants in a single gathering. Andrea Turkalo sketched the ears and other details of the elephants she studied to help identify them. Its only the ivory that will make the LRA strong, he recalls Konysaying. The study is extremely thorough and ticks off all the boxes, Roca says. All rights reserved. According to CITES Secretary-General John Scanlon, Sudan does not appear on these lists because CITES sets priorities based mainly on ivory seizures, and there have been few ivory seizures linked to Sudan in recent years. 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. They found that the tuskless trait was genetic, found in the X chromosome, and it was deadly in males. ", "We got into a boat; we went downriver," Turkalo says. "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. All around me I hear the click-clack of automatic weapons being loaded. 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. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. Suddenly they move steadily north, about 12 miles a day along the border with South Sudan, avoiding all roads. AUDIO: Justin O'Neill. World Elephant Day: Ten reasons we love elephants, Elephants counted from space for conservation project. "And there was moonlight and I could see he had a revolver and he might have been drinking. If he can do this, Ill ask him to make several more tusks. 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. 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. She's bundled in a heavy coat rarely needed during her years in the African bush. On September 11, 2014, Michael Onen, a sergeant in Konys army, walked out of Garamba National Park carrying an AK-47, five magazines of ammunition, and a story. 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. The poachers opened fire, killing five rangers. As she sips her tea in the Providence coffee shop, Turkalo is the picture of calm. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a treaty organization that governs international trade in ivoryand its continuing banhas identified eight countries of primary concern when it comes to international ivory trafficking: China, Kenya, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Uganda, Tanzania, and Vietnam. "It's another example of the imprint of [human] effect on nature," says wildlife ecologist George Wittemyer of Colorado State University, who was not involved in the research. . 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. Congolese soldiers undergo training by Mathieu Eckel of African Parks, an NGO that manages Garamba National Park with the DRCs parks authority. Schreger lines, he says. As in eye colour and blood type in humans, genes are responsible for whether elephants inherit tusks from their parents. 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. Then youre just the man for me.. The park has lost all its rhinos to poaching for their horns. 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. Its easier to live with things, she says. In presenting that case, ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo underscored Bashirs control of the groups said to be behind Sudans ivory trafficking: He used the army, he enrolled the Militia/Janjaweed. 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. The result: Some 30,000 African elephants are slaughtered every year, more than 100,000 between 2010 and 2012, and the pace of killing is not slowing. 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.. So I said to myself, 'I better go into a very passive mode.' 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