Poaching is altering the genetics of wild animals

[douglas9]

Sometime in the distant past, well before humans walked the Earth, the ancestors of modern-day elephants evolved their iconic tusks. Elephants use their bleach-white incisors — they’re technically giant teeth, like ours but longer — to dig, collect food, and protect themselves.

Then Homo sapiens arrived, and elephant tusks became a liability. Poachers kill the massive animals for their tusks, which are worth about $330 a pound wholesale as of 2017. Hunters slaughter roughly 20,000 elephants a year to supply the global ivory trade, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

But just as tusks evolved because they provide a number of benefits, a striking new study shows that some populations of African elephants have rapidly evolved to become tusk–less. Published in the journal Science, the paper’s authors found that many elephants in a park in Mozambique, which were heavily hunted for their ivory during a civil war a few decades ago, have lost their tusks — presumably because tuskless elephants are more likely to survive and pass the trait on to their offspring.



https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/22735163/elephant-tusks-genetics-evolution-adaptation-hunting

[Goonch]

1. ;-{)🖖‍

[bucolic_frolic]

2. They are smarter than we will ever know

[Tanuki]

3. But the consequences are bad, as they need their tusks!

From the article:

..."Elephants need their tusks to dig, lift objects, and defend themselves. The hulking incisors are not useless appendages.

The genes that seem to make female elephants tuskless also appear to prevent mothers from giving birth to male calves — that’s why all the tuskless elephants in the park are female, Pringle said. (Some mothers did give birth to males with tusks, who likely didn’t inherit the gene.) Over time, a shift in the sex of elephants could have consequences for population growth.".... (more )

[cayugafalls]

4. It is the unconscious conspiracy. Evolution.

Without knowing what they were doing the poachers were putting themselves out of business. Once the gene pool is saturated with tuskless adults, the 'unconscious conspiracy' is complete.

Good on you, Darwin.

[nuxvomica]

5. I wonder if elephants are selecting for the trait consciously

Consider this from the article:

What makes this study so fascinating is that it offers evidence of rapid evolution in an animal that has a pretty long lifespan — 50 or 60 years — in the wild, said Hendry and Fred Allendorf, a professor emeritus at the University of Montana who was not involved in the research.

Studies of elephants “rarely can say anything about the genetic basis” of tusklessness, Hendry said. For years, researchers assumed that rapid evolution was common only in small species with short life cycles. Given these results, “Nobody can argue that evolution isn’t occurring, even in the biggest and longest-lived species,” he added.

Elephants are very social, can communicate over great distances, and they have funerals for their dead. I think they are wicked smart and wonder if they may be consciously selecting mates for tuskless lineage.

[sinkingfeeling]

6. I was lucky to see one of the last "long tuskers" in Africa. These are

the old bulls with amazingly long tusks that almost touch the ground.