Long hopes to detail how elephants without the benefit of tusks as tools may alter their behavior to get access to nutrients. Another collaborator, Shane Campbell-Staton, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California Los Angeles, will study blood, searching for answers about how genetics influences the phenomenon of tusklessness.
Tusklessness does seem to occur disproportionately among females. Joyce Poole corroborates this. Perhaps the elephants are targeting different kinds of trees that are easier to strip, or trees that have already had some stripping by other elephants—giving them a prepared leverage point for tearing off bark.
Recent bans on the ivory trade in China and the U. Among Asian elephants , for example, a long history of hunting for ivory—as well as removing tusked elephants from the wild for labor—likely helped contribute to higher tuskless numbers there.
Exactly why the Asian and African elephant populations have such different rates of tusklessness remains unexplained. All rights reserved. Wildlife Watch is an investigative reporting project between National Geographic Society and National Geographic Partners focusing on wildlife crime and exploitation. Send tips, feedback, and story ideas to ngwildlife natgeo. Share Tweet Email. Why it's so hard to treat pain in infants.
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Tusks are quite handy for the animals. Elephants can use them to protect their trunks, dig for water, lift objects, strip bark from trees, gather food and defend themselves, according to " Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking " Da Capo Press, , by science journalist Rachel Nuwer. But once removed, these tusks don't grow back. But culling isn't a good option, either. With culling, people would take the greatest amount of ivory that is, kill older or weaker elephants from a herd without diminishing its population growth.
But elephants reproduce and grow so slowly that it would be impossible to meet market demand, according to a study published in the journal Current Biology.
Not everyone, however, knows that tusks don't grow back. The group found that 70 percent of respondents thought that ivory falls harmlessly out of elephants' mouths, just like a child losing a tooth, Nuwer reported. If that's the case, it appears that education is key: After IFAW volunteers told survey participants that removing an elephant's tusks kills the animal, more than 80 percent of respondents said they wouldn't buy ivory. Shortly after the survey, in , the IFAW launched a poster campaign that continues to reach 23 million people in China every day, Nuwer reported.
On the poster, a baby elephant happily tells his mom that it has teeth and asks, "Aren't you happy? Because of people's unnecessary want of ivory, hundreds and thousands of elephants are killed for the ivory trade. Generally speaking, male elephants use their impressive size to intimidate rivals and impress females. Size is so important in attracting mates that adult males have evolved to be twice as large as adult females, reaching a whopping seven metric tonnes.
This is the weight of four family cars — with passengers. As part of the package, male elephant tusks are often five to seven times as large as those of adult females. Some of the largest tusks ever recorded belonged to an old elephant called Ahmed , who lived in Kenya until the ripe old age of His tusks were 3m in length and weighed 67kg each.
That is 5kg more than the average weight of an adult human. Thanks to protection from the president of Kenya at the time, Ahmed got to live out his life in full, dying of old age in Sadly this is not the case for many elephants. Humans have long been attracted to the beautiful tusks of elephants. Ivory remains one of the most highly prized materials in the natural world. Those targeted are often the oldest and largest animals — because they have the biggest and therefore most valuable tusks. This is not only tragic for individual animals, but also for the wider elephant population , as the oldest and wisest elephants play a key leadership role in elephant society.
In fact, we conducted experiments showing that the oldest elephant matriarchs — the female leaders of the family groups — were much better than younger matriarchs at distinguishing more dangerous male lions from female lions using just the sound of their roars.
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