ELEPHANT poaching is alive and well—and the elephants are not. A team of scientists examining seized shipments of elephant tusks from Africa have found that the vast majority of the ivory came from elephants that died within the last three years.
The sobering results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal that the killing of elephants for their ivory is continuing at a disturbing pace—even as elephant populations across the continent are in sharp decline.
While poaching had been easing for several years, it has returned with a vengeance in the last decade or so, said lead author Thure Cerling, a geochemist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Central African forest elephants have fallen by an estimated 62 percent from 2002 to 2011. At the Selous Wildlife Reserve in Tanzania, savanna elephants have declined 66 percent from 2009 to 2013.
“There’s been a staggering rate of elephant loss every year,” Cerling said.
Last year in a study, led by Samuel Wasser of the University of Washington, scientists analyzed the DNA locked in 28 large seizures of ivory (at least half a ton each) made between 1996 and 2004, and matched it to 1,350 DNA samples taken from dung gathered at 71 spots across 29 different countries.
Now they could map the ivory’s sources, and watch as patterns of poaching changed as elephants in one country dwindled or as political pressure ramped up.
But some suggested that these seized shipments might not be ivory from recently killed animals, but old ivory “leaking” out of government stockpiles.
“Some people were saying, ‘Well, we don’t need to worry so much because there’s big stockpiles of ivory,’ so we’re getting legacy ivory into the market… and other people were saying, ‘No, no, no, these are all recent deaths,’” Cerling said.
To answer that question, the researchers analyzed 231 samples of ivory taken from 14 large caches (at least half a ton) confiscated between 2002 and 2014. They analyzed the carbon-14 in the pulp cavity inside the ivory, using a sample taken near the base—which would record the last two or three months of growth before the elephant died.
Scientists can figure out exactly how long ago an elephant died, thanks to the Cold War-fueled nuclear arms race.
The US and Russia’s spate of nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960s nearly doubled the global concentration of a certain carbon isotope, carbon-14, by 1963. That spike of carbon-14 is recorded in tree rings, in the bottom of the oceans, even in our own teeth. Because this isotope’s abundance has been declining at a well-known rate in the years since, scientists can use the carbon-14 concentration to tell when a living tissue first formed.
The researchers found that some 90 percent of the ivory was taken from animals that died less than three years before the ivory was seized by government officials. Out of 231 analyzed specimens, only one had a lag time longer than six years, the authors wrote.
“That means all of the ivory that’s being seized by customs is [from] very recently killed elephants,” Cerling said. “So, indeed, the crisis is severe if we’re going to preserve this species on our planet.”
There is a small silver lining: The findings showed that “legacy” ivory was not leaking out of sealed government stockpiles, as some had feared. “So that’s a very positive finding, that we’re not finding government officials selling old ivory or allowing that to happen,” Cerling said. Part of the problem is that, while demand for ivory in Europe and North America has dropped, markets in increasingly prosperous countries in Southeast Asia, such as China, Vietnam and the Philippines, have been growing.
“So, basically in 1989 in North America and Europe, most people said, ‘OK, yeah, this is a bad thing,’ and so ivory very quickly became something that’s not a desirable object,” Cerling said. “But that’s not true in Southeast Asia—and so when their economy improved, it became a desirable object.”
Educating potential consumers in these countries is key, he added—as is working with courts to ensure that they mete out severe sentences for breaking national and international laws on poaching.
“We’ve got a lot to do,” Cerling said. “And we’ve got to do it fast.”
Los Angeles Times/TNS