In June three more Garamba-based officers were killed. Why are you collecting ivory? Otti demanded of Kony. PHOTO EDITOR: Kathy Moran. It was supposed to be a short posting, but he saw too much death to leave. At least 26 elephants were massacred at the Dzanga Bai in the Central African Republic in the spring of 2013. We can't change the last bit we can shape the future. But in central Africa, as I learned firsthand, something more sinister is driving the killing: Militias and terrorist groups funded in part by ivory are poaching elephants, often outside their home countries, and even hiding inside national parks. We meet over Skype. DNA suggests that some of the ivory is from elephants killed in May 2013 at Dzanga Bai in CAR. That's painful to imagine, especially for anyone who's had the chance to watch these animals. "Not only do they recognize each other's calls, but the calls go far," she told NPR correspondent Alex Chadwick, who spent days with her back then, observing the elephants with Bill McQuay. The cook, Djimet Said (below), was shot but survived, walking 11 miles to the nearest village for help. Michael Onen, the defector from Konys army, told me that the LRA and the janjaweed had battled over ivory, with one group robbing the other, and that it was the janjaweeds success in trading ivory that originally gave Kony the idea to start killing elephants. Poaching has been curbed in Chads Zakouma National Park, but rebuilding the parks herd, now at 450, will take years. Turkalo is now part of an extraordinary operation to protect the surviving forest elephants. 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. Professor Robert Pringle of Princeton University said: "Tusklessness might be advantageous during a war, but that comes at a cost.". The LRA sells to the Sudan Armed Forces, Onen said. Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. It was just after 4 a.m. on Heban hill, in Chad, 80 miles from the Sudanese border and 60 miles northeast of Zakouma National Park, home to the countrys largest remaining elephant herd, 450 animals. 3. 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. The air strike, dubbed Operation Lightning Thunder, included support from the DRC, southern Sudan, and the U.S. Chad. TEXT EDITOR: Oliver Payne. Now, says the parks director, Rian Labuschagne, of African Parks, my biggest fear is that theyll start coming in pairs.. 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. "As a result there were large numbers of soldiers in the area and a lot of associated. He said they bury sealed buckets of water along parched travel routes and bury ivory for safekeeping as well. To look for genes that might be involved, the team took blood from 18 female elephants in the park and sequenced their genomes. He went first to Sudan, initiating a pattern of border-hopping that continues to make him difficult to track. This ideathat an animal's perception of danger . 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. The relationship is close: SAF warns Kony if theres trouble, Onen says. for their tusks. A few days later the tusks proceed to Songo, the Sudanese market town where Onen said Konys men trade ivory. Tusklessness became more common in the female elephants of Mozambique 's Gorongosa National Park after rampant ivory poaching during the country's 15-year civil war. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Some elephant populations seem to be missing their tusks. Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. November 6, 1954, Page 3 Buy Reprints. So 50% of her daughters will be tusked. His control is absolute.. They also had twice as many daughters as sons. Sudan. For his Judas pig project he built GPS satellite collars to enable pest control authorities in New Zealand to send feral pigs into the bush and locate their invasive piggy friends. One possibility is that surges of intense hunting have occurred on and off in Gorongosa over millennia, letting the genes occasionally provide a benefit. It was the rainy season, and the rangers, like the elephants they were guarding, had left the park for higher ground. They can get what they want today, he said, and keep it there for two, three, or even more than five years.. 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. Its not a secret to anyone that Konys in Sudan, says the State Departments Marty Regan. Traits that are beneficial in one environment may not be beneficial in another. Gathering speed, they continue north before abruptly turning east, in the direction of Khartoum. Eventually, more than four tons was found, Africas largest seizure since the global ivory trade ban took effect in 1990. It is assumed that the girls were raped, so its difficult for them to find husbands. In March 2006 he fled for the DRC and set up camp in Garamba National Park, then home to some 4,000 elephants. Civil war drove these elephants to lose their tusksthrough evolution. 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. Sudan is not on these lists, even though Sudanese poachers are a primary reason elephants are killed in several of the countries listed by CITES as of primary or secondary concern. FANIE PELLETIER: It's one of the most detailed example of how human activity can influence the genes of a population. But seeing it in front of you, and knowing those individuals are related, that makes my day. Like much of the world, George Dante knows that the African elephant is under siege. Michael K. Nichols/National Geographic/Getty Images. A young elephant splashes in a stream that runs through the bai. Arent you interested in peace talks?. Shane Campbell-Staton, an evolutionary biologist now at Princeton University, was curious about the elephants of Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, where tuskless elephantswhich are all femaleare unusually common. 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. You did exactly what you were supposed to do, I said, shaking their hands. After more than an hour of animated debate, they phone the airports wildlife expert. Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. Fifty percent will be tuskless. - 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. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. Will they go north, the most violent ivory path on the African continent? You can hear the original field recordings and interviews from Radio Expedition's 2002 elephant story, and see photos and night-vision video from the elephant bai, on the archive's website. His wife, abducted later, was killed. "During the war, Gorongosa was essentially the geographic center of the conflict," Long said via email. 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. Villagers sometimes taunt returned children with the same expression used for Konys men: LRA Tongo Tongo. LRA Cut Cuta reference, Sugule explains, to the militants vicious use ofmachetes. Ivory operates as a savings account for Kony, says Marty Regan, of the U.S. State Departments Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. 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. As long-ranging animals, they shape vast swaths of wildlands, stomping and chomping through them, sparring with trees, rearranging foliage. Rangers practice their riding skills at Zakouma National Park, in Chad. Their path is consistent with the route Konys defectors tell me ivory takes on the way to the warlords Kafia Kingi base. Erik Stokstad is a reporter at Science, covering environmental issues. The women motored downriver toward the Democratic Republic of Congo. When the American Museum of Natural History wanted to update the hall of North American mammals, taxidermist George Dante got the call. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Here a ranger unit is permanently deployed to protect one of the parks most important assets: a radio tower that was being built. So support charities who put a stop to that. Unlike Savanna elephants, forest elephants don't have natural predators, such as lions. 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. It was several weeks after that, that she heard that poachers taking advantage of the chaos in the country had invaded the bai. They set up camp and in a four-month rampage killed up to 650 elephants. 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. 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. Poachers killed at least 132 last year, and as of this June, rangers had discovered another 42 carcasses with bullet holes, more than 30 attributed to a single Sudanese poaching expeditiona combined loss amounting to more than 10 percent of the parks entire population of elephants, estimated now to be no more than about 1,500. They killed fewer elephants per hunt but were much harder to track and stop. My artificial tusks sit motionless for several weeks, a pair of tear-shaped blue dots on my computer screen, which displays a digital map of the eastern corner of CAR. Six antipoaching rangers and their cook, the entirety of the Hippotrague (French for roan antelope) unit, were awake, dressed in camouflage uniforms, and preparing for morning prayersdevoted even in the darkness. Kony even invited foreign press into his camp for interviews. There were armed combatants roaming the countryside. Money is available to outfit the rangers with better equipment, but buying new weapons requires formal approval of the Congolese army, something Froment has been unable to get. In May 2013 Seleka-backed Sudanese poachers attacked Dzanga Bai, an elephant oasis in Dzanga-Ndoki National Park of southwest CAR, killing 26 elephants. 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. Turkalo is now part of an extraordinary operation to protect the surviving forest elephants. "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. A global march demanding action to stop elephant and rhino poaching will be held . 'Everybody out, everybody out.' 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. ", 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. Researchers at the bai learned to identify individual elephants by the shape and characteristics of their ears. Or will they go nowhere, discovered before theyre moved and turned in by an honest person? By Bryan ChristyPhotographs by Brent StirtonPublished August 12, 2015. 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. This pushed the species to the brink of extinction. 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. Our airport incident was one of many hiccups with the artificial tusks. CORNISH: That's Fanie Pelletier, a wildlife biologist in Canada who wasn't involved in the work. 5. A small proportion of females . Katy Payne/The Elephant Listening Project Soldiers Kill Wild Elephant. 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. Officials are pointing fingers and arguing. The Central African Republic (CAR). HOW MANY TIMES ?? (Special thanks to the National Public Radio - National Geographic Society Radio Expeditions Sound Collection at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, for sharing the audio.). 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. Written in Acholi, it details Konys order for a hundred elephant tusks. Turkalo is compact and direct, and wears her dark hair pulled back in a bun. I just can't understand why anyone would want to take away any of the amazing qualities and features of an elephant. As of this writing, my artificial tusks sent out their last communication from a Sudanese town called Ed Daein, 500 miles southwest of Khartoum. The NPR team had spent hours on that platform with Andrea, seeing these huge animals in a way few people in the world have a chance to do, and with someone who could "translate" what they were doing. 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 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. 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. Zakouma breathes its elephants. The Rhodesian armed forces lacked the manpower to effectively protect its 1,300-kilometre (800 mi) border with Mozambique against entering ZANLA insurgents. 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 story typically would have ended with the wanton killing of these park rangers protecting elephants. Meanwhile, according to Onen, Konys men hid ivory by burying it in the ground or submerging it in rivers. Its easier to live with things, she says. Eight more are considered of secondary concern: Cameroon, Congo, the DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Mozambique, and Nigeria. Normally both male and female African elephants have tusks, which are really a pair of massive teeth. EVERY SINGLE animal on this planet is special and this doesn't happen to monkeys or crocodiles or birds does it? The women pushed on downriver. By 1913, the African elephant population had dropped to an estimated 10 million. The cook, Djimet Said (opposite), was shot but survived, walking 11 miles to the nearest village for help. 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. 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. CORNISH: You see; while most African elephants have tusks, some female African elephants are born without them and never grow them. 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. After Lucienne Lanziwas husband died in an LRA attack on Garamba, she got a modest stipend. Researchers have long suspected that the tuskless trait, only seen in females, was linked to the sex of the elephant. The White Elephant symbolizes distinctive things for both the man and Jig. After Sudanese poachers killed his ranger father, Adoum refused diya, a traditional community payment. ", They were the Seleka the Muslim rebels who had overthrown the national government in the spring of 2013. Now it was rare to see 250 in aherd. So, they are actually teeth. 4. 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. 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. In 1994 Kony left Uganda and took his murderous gang on the road. During the Mozambican civil war, both sides financed their efforts by poaching elephants for ivory. Mozambique's elephants declined from an estimated 20,000 to 10,300 during the same period. You must be a real animal lover, I say. In Mozambique, past hunting pressure led to an increase of . I unzip my suitcase to expose two fake tusks and hand him letters from the U.S. But last year at the bai, she says, she feared for her life. As in eye colour and blood type in humans, genes are responsible for whether elephants inherit tusks from their parents. By skewing their evolution, humans fiddle with elephants' role in the ecosystem too. 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. First, Campbell-Staton wanted to make sure the proportion of tuskless elephants in Mozambique had indeed changed. The culprits are believed to have been South Sudanese, according to African Parks. The Elephant Listening Project 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. Zakouma National Park has lost nearly 90 percent of its elephants since 2002. Turkalo clearly would rather be back in Africa than in a coffee house in Rhode Island. Ive flown from Garamba park headquarters to a dirt airstrip deep inside the park to join an antipoaching patrol. ", Now, a year later, Andrea is stoic about the loss. They have flashbacks. Other roads also lead to Sudan. 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. Around us stroll Ugandan army soldiers, who make up the entire African Union contingent based in Obo and are committed to finding and killing Kony. It's nothing extraordinary for humans. " Turkalo and the other women stopped their boat, afraid they'd be fired on if they kept going. Members of the Ugandan armys dog-tracking team lift weights at the African Union base in Obo, CAR. Elephants gather in the Dzanga bai, a forest clearing the size of several football fields. 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. Soldiers killed elephants to acquire ivory which was later sold to finance arms and ammunition. Accuracy and availability may vary. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Geographic certifying that theyre artificial. By 1979, there were only 1.3 million elephants left. 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. 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. This behavior is associated with mourning, field researchers say. 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%. So why elephants? 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. My tusks will have to act like ivory. Learn more about the Explorer series. He points a finger at me, and yells, You are a liar, bwana! (Bwana is Swahili for sir.). Such a biased sex ratio would be expected with a recessive gene that kills males when they inherit it. At the time Sudans north and south were in a civil war, and Kony offered Sudans government, in Khartoum, a way to destabilize the south. 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. ", Turkalo says she walked up to the man in charge and saw he had an AK-47 assault rifle. 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. Veteran ranger Jean Claude Mambo Marindo sits beside almost a hundred tusks seized from elephant poachers at Garamba National Park, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). MCCAMMON: Around 90% of the elephants there were killed, but many female elephants without tusks survived and thrived. During the civil war in Mozambique,soldiers killed elephants with tusks in order to sell the ivory, so fewer elephants with tusks survived. What can be done to help save the elephants? Elephant ivory is a key source of funding for armed groups in central Africa . 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. During the civil war between 1977 to 1992, poachers sold the ivory to finance the conflict, including buying arms and ammunition. "When it gets bad we leave.". 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. The family of Idriss Adoum (top, second from left) tracked one suspect to Sudan. 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. "And there was moonlight and I could see he had a revolver and he might have been drinking. Armed groups help fund operations by smuggling elephant ivory. a. percentage of elephants killed . His army farmed vegetables. But Onen got his way. Soldiers killed elephants for their ivory tusks, which were extremely valuable. An official in Dar es Salaams international airport, in Tanzaniaone of several countries I scouted for launching my tusks into the illegal tradesquints at an x-ray screen as my luggage rolls through hisscanner. 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. 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. The park has lost all its rhinos to poaching for their horns. As far as Onen knew, the poaching squad he abandoned was still making its way north from Garamba through CAR to Sudan. Rather be back in a stream that runs through the bai learned to identify individual elephants the! Her dark hair pulled back in a four-month rampage killed up to 650 elephants katy Payne/The Listening. He fled for the DRC and set up camp and in a coffee house in Island! 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Also had twice as many daughters as sons by Bryan ChristyPhotographs by Brent StirtonPublished August 12, 2015 elephants in. Natural predators, such as lions to some 4,000 elephants, dubbed operation Lightning Thunder, included support from DRC... He went first to Sudan, initiating a pattern of border-hopping that continues to make sure the proportion tuskless. The women motored downriver toward the Democratic Republic of Congo Bryan ChristyPhotographs by Brent StirtonPublished August,! It details Konys order for a hundred elephant tusks the air strike, dubbed operation Lightning Thunder, support... Are beneficial in one environment May not be beneficial in another ivory which later. Their evolution, humans fiddle with elephants & # x27 ; s perception of danger join an patrol! Proportion of tuskless elephants in the country had invaded the bai, an elephant in. Culprits are believed to have been South Sudanese, according to Onen Konys... 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