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. Jensen, who was executive producer of the series, and Alex Chadwick, chief correspondent, insisted on the highest quality sound recording to complement its reporting. They found that the tuskless trait was genetic, found in the X chromosome, and it was deadly in males. FANIE PELLETIER: It's one of the most detailed example of how human activity can influence the genes of a population. Dzanga Baialso known as the village of elephantsis a mineral-rich mudhole where the animalscongregate. a. percentage of elephants killed . Katy Payne/The Elephant Listening Project PRODUCER: Janey Adams. 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. Garamba National Park, in the northeast corner of the DRC and on the border with South Sudan, is a UNESCO World Heritage site, internationally famous for its elephants and its boundless ocean of green. PELLETIER: The reason why that's important is because if you stop the killing right now, you know, the time it would take for the population to, you know, restore that traits would be much longer. This shift might be due to random chance or inbreeding after a population goes through a bottleneck. But she knew she had to leave; she's a researcher for a non-governmental wildlife organization, not some kind of soldier-of-fortune. In March 2006 he fled for the DRC and set up camp in Garamba National Park, then home to some 4,000 elephants. By 1913, the African elephant population had dropped to an estimated 10 million. Do we really need to sell ivory tusks in the world just to make money? Why are you collecting ivory? Otti demanded of Kony. 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. But Onen got his way. This ideathat an animal's perception of danger . It was used to make combs, pool balls, knick-knacks, and even piano keys. That's so terrible! Having worked extensively throughout central Africa, Froment transferred to Garamba in early 2014 after rangers discovered dozens of elephant carcasses in the park. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Some elephant populations seem to be missing their tusks. We protect the elephant to protect the park. In May 2013 poachers with the insurgent group Seleka massacred 26 elephants at Dzanga Bai, amineral-rich watering hole in CAR. A welcome sight returns to Zakouma: babies. It's nothing extraordinary for humans. 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. During the summer Konys soldiers had killed 25 elephants in Garamba, and they were on their way back to Kony carrying the ivory. 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. 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. The UN estimated that the massacre displaced more than a hundred thousand Congolese and Sudanese. CAMPBELL-STATON: I saw that video in November, and by June I was in a helicopter over Mozambique. Female elephants do use their tusks, but female elephants in Mozambique are doing just fine without them, according to Long. The culprits are believed to have been South Sudanese, according to African Parks. This story was originally published in the September 2015 issue of National Geographicmagazine. 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. Now, scientists say that drove some elephants to evolve tusklessness. Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. November 6, 1954, Page 3 Buy Reprints. Which raises the question: If ivory is poached by Sudanese, where is it going? Elephant ivory is a key source of funding for armed groups in central Africa . So why elephants? In 2013, Khamis Kagasheki, then Tanzanias minister of natural resources and tourism, declared that the illegal ivory trade involves rich people and politicians who have formed a very sophisticated network, and he accused four members of Tanzanias Parliament of being involved init. Accuracy and availability may vary. But a new study suggests there is a serious reason for why lots of tuskless elephants can now be found in the country of Mozambique in Africa - poaching. But Turkalo decided not to leave the region right away. To me, it seems reasonable to think that the radiomans defection might have slowed the progress of the 25 elephants tusks headed to Kony. Suddenly they move steadily north, about 12 miles a day along the border with South Sudan, avoiding all roads. That evening, they floated by a village. 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. when will hunters get the message we need other species alive on our planet for our own species to survive . I'm outraged as to how some people have the audacity to kill these inconncent , sentient creatures who , like most animals help keep the food chain stable. By 1913, the African elephant population had dropped to an estimated 10 million. Konys response was immediate and savage. ", Andrea Turkalo sketched the ears and other details of the elephants she studied to help identify them. "And there was moonlight and I could see he had a revolver and he might have been drinking. 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. The team calculated that 18.5 percent of female elephants did not have tusks before the war began. By skewing their evolution, humans fiddle with elephants' role in the ecosystem too. The air strike, dubbed Operation Lightning Thunder, included support from the DRC, southern Sudan, and the U.S. No, I want ivory for ammunition to keep fighting, was Konys reply, according to Onen, who was listening to transmissions. Now, researchers report this intense hunting dramatically altered a major elephant population there, favoring female elephants born without tusks. In the criminal world, ivory operates as currency, so in a way Im asking Dante to print counterfeit money I canfollow. " Turkalo and the other women stopped their boat, afraid they'd be fired on if they kept going. Since the 2008-09 attack by Konys soldiers, rangers have finished building a new headquarters and acquired two airplanes and a helicopter. "But I'm certain I knew a few of the elephants they killed," she says including some that the NPR team had recorded. 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. Andrea Turkalo sketched the ears and other details of the elephants she studied to help identify them. I mean, I've been through a lot of poaching.". 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. Turkalo clearly would rather be back in Africa than in a coffee house in Rhode Island. It was several weeks after that, that she heard that poachers taking advantage of the chaos in the country had invaded the bai. Konys men jump back and forth across borders, hiding in countries where governance is weak. 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. It consists of a battery capable of lasting more than a year, a GPS receiver, an Iridium satellite transceiver, and a temperature sensor. 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. Ongwen also said that Kony intends to form a squad to establish contact with Boko Haram, the Nigerian terrorist group responsible for widespread killings and the kidnappings of hundreds of Nigerian women and schoolgirls. From the moment of his capture, Onen says, he was a complainer. She and other scientists also recorded their calls. Can fake tusks with hidden GPS trackers thwartthem? When the American Museum of Natural History wanted to update the hall of North American mammals, taxidermist George Dante got the call. We'll tell you more about them Friday, on NPR's Morning Edition. 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. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Next, researchers wanted to pin down the mechanism of inheritance for tusklessness. Science and AAAS are working tirelessly to provide credible, evidence-based information on the latest scientific research and policy, with extensive free coverage of the pandemic. Now, says the parks director, Rian Labuschagne, of African Parks, my biggest fear is that theyll start coming in pairs.. A forum for discussion about elephants and rhinos and a rally point for those who want to getinvolved. 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. The park has four mounted ranger teams because horses are the only way to effectively patrol during the wet season, when the elephants head to drier land outside the park. The focus of the series was on nature, diverse cultures, and endangered environments.Its intent, according its creator Carolyn Jensen, who passed away in 2010, was to give listeners the sound equivalent of National Geographic photos. On some days more then 100 elephants at at a time visit the clearing. Ugandan forces killed Binany in 2013 and recovered thediary. Seleka and its rival, anti-Balaka, have set fire to people, thrown them off bridges, and murdered people wantonly, turning CAR into a lawless statethe kind of place where Konys group and other terrorist organizations thrive. In . As in eye colour and blood type in humans, genes are responsible for whether elephants inherit tusks from their parents. Rogue militias and army soldiers from the DRC, Sudan, and South Sudan are slaughtering elephants in the park. Seleka rebels had a stock of about 300 ivory tusks that they sold, which enabled them to get the supplies that helped them overthrow President Franois Boziz in CAR, Ongwen told African Union forces, according to his debriefing. Soldiers killed elephants for their ivory tusks, which were extremely valuable. 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. The New York Times Archives. 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. It's run by a band of men who, if not exactly soldiers-of-fortune, certainly are trained warriors. But in the generation born after the war, the rate was 33%, according to decades of observations by the nonprofit group ElephantVoices. Diya is for accidents, he says. When humans hunt, they can cause their quarry to evolve by targeting individuals with particular traits, like big fish or sheep with hefty horns. 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. COPY EDITOR: Cindy Leitner, Hear Brent Stirton tell their stories in an audioslideshow, Hear Bryan Christy discuss the investigation on. It was just impossible to stay. 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. In ten years hes never made a mistake, he says: The tusks are real. The poaching issue is a governance issue, Froment says. Track the GPS unit in an interactive map. for their meat. Turkalo is now part of an extraordinary operation to protect the surviving forest elephants. That's just something to think about and consider really because it's absolutely RIDICULOUS that any animal should have to go through that. 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. They all report to him, they all obey him. PHOTO EDITOR: Kathy Moran. It is assumed that the girls were raped, so its difficult for them to find husbands. When theyre abducted, theyre very young, and theyre forced to do horrible things. Tongo Tongo shot two elephants one day, she says. - during that 15-year period had all these cascading consequences, all the way up from, you know, a single gene to an entire ecosystem health. This comment was removed because it broke the rules. And I was like, ooh, what's this? They had nowhere to run." Geli Oh, 16, spent longer with Konys army than her two friendstwo and a half terrible years. b. percentage of elephants killed . "I could hear the call and say, 'Yeah, that's a juvenile being pushed out of a hole by its mother; it's protesting.' Turkalo had lived through civil strife before, but this time, she tells us, it was much worse. But last year at the bai, she says, she feared for her life. SHANE CAMPBELL-STATON: The Howard Hughes Medical Institute - they had this video that was called "The Tuskless Elephants Of Gorongosa." One moves north toward Heban, the other west toward centralChad. Our next story begins in a place many of us are familiar with - up awake, watching a YouTube video at 3 in the morning. Like much of the world, George Dante knows that the African elephant is under siege. Otti was furious, Onen says. After more than an hour of animated debate, they phone the airports wildlife expert. Albert Roca, a geneticist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, calls the shift striking in its speedand because it is driven by people. He said they bury sealed buckets of water along parched travel routes and bury ivory for safekeeping as well. And I gotta find a way to get that shine, Dante says, referring to the gloss a clean elephant tusk has. Written in Acholi, it details Konys order for a hundred elephant tusks. Some 30,000 African elephants die each year at the hands of poachers to satisfy the global demand for ivory. They shot 26 elephants and cut out their tusks. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Large-tusked elephants in Gorongosa were killed for their ivory, which was sold to buy arms and ammunition. Killings of civilians have likewise dropped, from 1,252 in 2009 to 13 in 2014, but abductions are rising again, and it takes the arrival of only a few of the armed militants to send fear ricocheting through communities. Andrea says all she was able to rescue were electronic copies of her research data. He said: "We actually expect that this syndrome will decrease in frequency in our study population, provided that the conservation picture continues to stay as positive as it has been recently. One of them knew one of the women in the boat. But Dante, who is one of the worlds most respected taxidermists, has never done what Im asking him to do. So 50% of her daughters will be tusked. Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project, Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. 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. Or will they go nowhere, discovered before theyre moved and turned in by an honest person? 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. 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. The family of Idriss Adoum (second from left) tracked one suspect to Sudan. I order a satellite shot of their location from DigitalGlobe, a commercial vendor of space imagery, and ask for outside help interpreting it. 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%. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. We meet over Skype. Tusk inheritance patterns in the ElephantVoices database backed up that assumption. 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. Elephant tusks are elongated incisors. The Central African Republic (CAR). Fifty percent of her sons will be tusked, but that other 50% would die. I wonder if Konys men are out there now. Five of the six men in Zakoumas Hippotrague patrol unit were killed by elephant poachers outside the park; the sixth is presumed dead. 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. 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. Once the war and poaching ended,elephants with tusks were more likely to survive because they could use their tusks to find . Click the arrow below to hear the amazing audio tale they brought home. The Elephant Listening Project When north and south Sudan signed a peace agreement in 2005, Kony lost his Sudanese host. Theyre in a place 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the ambient temperature, so perhaps theyve been buried in the backyard. For ten years Khartoum supplied him with food, medicine, and arms, including automatic rifles, antiaircraft guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. The cook, Djimet Said (opposite), was shot but survived, walking 11 miles to the nearest village for help. Follow theirroute. VIDEO: J.J. Kelley, NG Studios. During the rains the park is more lake than land, and elephants split into two groups to escape the floods. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Geographic certifying that theyre artificial. But one of the murdered men, Idriss Adoum, had a younger brother, Saleh, who resolved that, when the rains stopped, he and a cousin would hunt the killers in Sudan, where so many ivory roads lead. 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