What kind of fear and trauma do elephants who are born without tusks go through?

A tuskless female elephant named Valda in Gorongosa National Park. The hole in the middle of her right ear may be caused by a bullet. © ElephantVoices via AP

Leviathan Press

This is a really sad story. The record for the longest tusk of an African elephant is 102.7 kilograms. It is precisely because of their teeth that they were almost completely extinct by humans. However, natural selection is like a divine helper. Those elephants who were full of fear of humans quickly evolved into toothless baby elephants through the reproduction of just a few generations.

From an objective perspective, these tuskless elephants have indeed escaped poaching to some extent, but it is difficult to say whether this is good or bad for their future survival - especially considering the importance of elephants to the entire ecosystem.

As the saying goes, elephants never forget. Well, the elephants of Gorongosa National Park’s wildlife haven may remember Mozambique’s civil war better than some humans do. The memory of the 15-year civil war, which lasted from 1977 to 1992, is so indelible that it’s written into the elephants’ genes.

Thanks to mass killings by warring soldiers, who needed ivory to trade for weapons to support their long-running civil war, more and more elephants in the Gorongosa region were born without their second most distinctive feature: their tusks—natural selection cleverly stepped in and, after just a few generations, made the species less attractive to human predators.

© Elephant Voices via AP

As can be seen in this photo taken in October 2021, there are many elephants without tusks in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique. Normally, huge tusks are an advantage for elephants, allowing them to dig for water, peel bark off trees for food, and fight with other elephants. But in large-scale ivory poaching, these large teeth have become a liability.

This also makes them a bit rude.

Compared with elephant populations in Kenya and other places, the elephants in Gorongosa are the most fearful of their kind. They wave their trunks and are more likely to rush towards humans driving jeeps and Land Rovers, because in their memory, these four-wheeled things bring death. Although 30 years have passed since that war, for elephants, this peace is extremely fragile and uncertain.

🔺Many elephants over 30 years old have bullet holes in their ears.

“They have a certain inherent stubbornness,” said Joyce Poole, scientific director of the nonprofit Elephant Voices, who has studied elephants for nearly 50 years. “Many of the elephants in Gorongosa are old enough to remember the vehicles with soldiers on them, and the younger elephants learn from that behavior. It’s intergenerational trauma.”

Gorongosa National Park is located at the southern end of the Great Rift Valley of East Africa. After 30 years of reconstruction after the war, elephants finally got a chance to breathe. During the war, ruthless hunting reduced their local population from about 4,000 before the war to less than 200 .

A tuskless female elephant and her two calves in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique. © Elephant Voices via AP

Periscope sniffing: a common maneuver among Gorongosa elephants. Elephants raise their trunks to detect scents carried on the wind. Their sense of smell is superior to that of hounds. Elephants use this method especially when they detect strangers or potential dangers. © Elephant Voices

In Gorongosa, elephants are reclaiming their role as ecosystem “public engineers”—pushing down trees and chewing tall grass to clear paths for other park animals such as hippos, buffalo, zebra, and wildebeest. Under their meteoric strides, fallen brush provides shelter for antelope, which can hide from lions among fallen branches, while porcupines build dens among overturned tree roots. Those with tusks strip bark from trees in search of fiber-rich nutrients, creating homes for certain tree-dwelling lizards.[1]

These 10-foot-tall beasts consume up to 300 pounds of leaves, fruits, and roots every day, leaving behind copious amounts of feces that help fertilize the soil and spread seeds, furthering the vegetation cycle and ensuring plant diversity. Even the land they tread on is teeming with life—the deep footprints of their 13,000-pound limbs allow rainwater to flow in, providing shelter for dozens of aquatic microbes. People who study elephants often call them “ecosystem engineers,” and for good reason.

Ecosystem Engineers: Elephants consume up to 136 kg of leaves, fruits and roots every day, leaving behind large amounts of dung that helps fertilize the soil and spread seeds, furthering the vegetation cycle and ensuring plant diversity. © Piotr Naskrecki

Poole has been around elephants since she was a child. When she was 6, she and her father were startled by a charging elephant in Malawi. But that initial frightening encounter turned into an enduring fascination with the largest land animals on the planet, and also one of the most hunted on Earth.

Poole (right) and his brother Bob in Amboseli, with Odinga, an African elephant, in the background, in 1967. © ElephantVoices

Despite numerous international agreements banning the ivory trade since 1990, according to the World Wildlife Federation, approximately 20,000 African elephants are still poached each year as part of an illegal wildlife trade worth an estimated $20 billion per year.[2] It is estimated that there are only about 415,000 elephants on the continent today, compared to an estimated 3 to 5 million just a century ago .

Despite the ivory ban, poaching remains widespread, to the point that the World Wildlife Fund predicts that elephants may no longer exist as early as 2040.[3]

Poole traveled to Gorongosa several times between 2012 and 2019 to study the elephants. She said their numbers have recovered to about 1,000. However, they have still been altered by the war.

Mozambique lost nearly 10,000 elephants in just five years, between 2009 and 2014, including this one from the Niassa National Reserve. © lastair Nelson

Tusks are essentially overgrown teeth, similar to the structure of our incisors in our mouths. But imagine that incisors can grow to 2.1 meters in your lifetime. Mammalian teeth have three layers, the outer layer is hard enamel, and the inner layer is composed of blood vessels and nerves. The middle layer is made of a softer substance called dentin, which is what we know as ivory.

Ivory is not a solid material. It contains tiny channels filled with a waxy liquid. This structure makes ivory easy to carve. It also gives polished ivory its warm, bright color, which makes it so prized.

Despite implementing a domestic ivory sales ban in 2017 under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), China remains the largest consumer of ivory .[4]

In Hong Kong, a hub for the illegal trade, ivory can fetch up to $3,000 per pound, with a pair of carved tusks fetching as much as $200,000. Poachers get paid much less, about $100 to $200 per pound, but in Africa that's a lot of money, especially considering a pair of tusks from an adult male elephant can weigh up to 250 pounds .

An elephant dies after poachers sawed off its tusks in Zakouma National Park on October 24, 2008. Poachers opened fire with automatic weapons on a group of elephants in an effort to get their tusks. The park was once home to a large herd of elephants, but poachers have decimated the population over the past few years. It is the epicenter of the ivory war. © Jeff Hutchens/Getty Images

Criminal gangs are behind much of the poaching, often in league with terrorist groups such as Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army or Somalia’s al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Shabaab, both of which are said to raise funds through poaching.[5] Mozambique enacted tough anti-poaching laws in 2014, but recent reports in the African media of ivory seizures by people claiming to be working for large organizations suggest that the country faces an ongoing crisis for its elephants. Moreover, the aftermath of the civil war periodically flares up, threatening a return to past bloodshed .[7]

At some point before natural selection separated us into different mammal species, elephants and humans shared a common ancestor that was a placental mammal. But while our smaller teeth are designed for biting and grinding food, elephants use their tusks for many other tasks, such as gathering and digging for food and water, defending themselves, and lifting objects like a forklift.

The tusks also protect the elephants’ trunks, themselves a deft and muscular marvel of evolution, similar to our tongues – if only we could breathe and drink through them. Like us, elephants can be left-handed or right-handed – and over time, the tusks that are preferred can become more worn.

Kenyan anti-poaching rangers in front of the carcass of an elephant killed by poachers. © AFP/Getty Images

In Asian elephant populations, only males have tusks. But in African elephants, tusks are monogamous, meaning both males and females have tusks. ** In safe environments—where generations of elephants have been raised safe from poachers—only about 2 or 3 percent of females are born without tusks, Poole told me.

But in the past few years, Gorongosa's elephant community has been insecure. Even before the war, Mozambique's elephants were suffering from severe poaching.

Poole says that about 19% of female elephants in Gorongosa are tuskless , a fact she confirmed by reviewing historical footage and modern observations, suggesting that adaptive selection for ivory, due to poaching, was taking hold before the war began .

After the civil war, the number of elephants without tusks increased dramatically.

Of the 200 female elephants Poole tracked, 51% of those who survived the war (aged 25 and older) were tuskless. This tusklessness then seemed to be passed on to their offspring: 32% of female elephants born after the war were tuskless.

The weight of tusks increases with age, with male elephants having larger and heavier tusks than female elephants of the same age. " Poachers tend to focus on older males, but once their numbers are depleted, older females become the target ," Poole said. Because poachers select females with tusks over those without, over time the proportion of tuskless females starts to greatly increase, especially in older herds.

These observations raise a unique and somewhat surprising question: Could the absence of tusks be an evolutionary response that we are observing here and now? If so, why is it happening only in females?

In 2021, Poole, Princeton University biologist Shane Campbell-Stanton, and others published an important paper in Science that attracted widespread attention from the scientific community and other fields[8]. The study showed that the pressure of poaching on elephants did stimulate the rapid evolution of this tusk-less adaptation .

Sean Campbell-Stanton and another Princeton biologist, Brian Arnold, who co-authored the paper, sequenced the genomes of 11 elephants with tusks and seven elephants without tusks to identify segments of DNA that differed between them. They also searched for regions of the elephant genome that showed signs of recent natural selection, unaffected by random DNA recombination.

This photo shows a tuskless female elephant being tranquilized while collecting genetic samples in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique, in 2018. © Rob Pringle

They found two genes that seemed to be playing a role—both are responsible for helping mammals produce tooth enamel and form teeth. The one that best explained what Poole and Campbell-Stanton had observed in the Gorongosa elephants was a gene called AMELX, which is located on the X chromosome .

The finding also explains why only females are affected. AMELX has some important neighbors without which the animal cannot survive. But because all of these genes are packed tightly together, one gene cannot be affected without affecting another. If a neighboring gene is affected, a mutation affecting AMELX could cause the entire organism to collapse.

Joyce Poole recording elephant calls in Amboseli in 2005. © ElephantVoices

Females, however, can weather these dangers because they have two X chromosomes. If one gene is damaged, it has a backup. Males, with XY chromosomes, don't . This helps explain why Poole has seen only a handful of tuskless males in her 50-year career, and none at Gorongosa. The mutation causes males to die in utero. Poole says there appear to be no obvious effects on the females other than their lack of tusks and their adaptations to the situation.

Researchers are not sure exactly which mutations in the AMELX gene cause the toothless trait. But a discovery in the human genome suggests they are looking in the right direction. In 2009, researchers studied a human subject that was missing AMELX and its neighboring genes.[9] The subject was missing one incisor and had another very small incisor. These are the same type of teeth that grow into tusks in elephants .

What's important about the Gorongosa elephant discovery is that we can see rapid evolution happening in a species that has a relatively long lifespan . Elephants can live into their 70s, Poole's research shows. A generation of elephants -- the time span from birth to when they can reproduce -- takes about 14 to 17 years.

For many years, researchers believed that rapid evolution was common only in small species. Poole and others’ research has shattered that notion. Now, it’s clear that large, slow-breeding species like elephants are also suffering because of human influence.

Due to poaching for their tusks over the past 50 years, elephants in some areas are already born without tusks. © The Mirror

Poole also said the tuskless elephants were not limited to Gorongosa .

Similar situations have emerged in other countries. South Africa is a depressing example, where early Boer colonists hunted elephants for their tusks and later targeted them for legal “extermination” operations— 98% of female elephants in Addo Elephant National Park were tuskless in the early 2000s. Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park, like Gorongosa, suffered from severe poaching in the last few decades of the last century, with one in five female elephants over the age of five missing tusks .

Even if tooth loss saves some female elephants from poachers, the absence of these overly long teeth in an ecosystem could have other consequences . Rob Pringle of Princeton University, a co-author of the 2021 paper on the adaptability of tuskless elephants, showed in an earlier, separate paper[10] how elephants use their tusks to strip bark from trees and dig into the soil, helping to shape savannas and benefit other species.

Ivory helps elephants dig into the ground and search for food and water. It also benefits other species. © Pinterest

The gene that produces tuskless elephants also appears to prevent mothers from giving birth to male calves, although some mothers have given birth to male calves with tusks who may not have inherited the gene, Poole said. Over time, an excess of tuskless females could affect population growth . Gorongosa National Park ecologists also hope to study whether tuskless elephants change the diet of elephants, how they move nutrients from one place to another, and how they affect other animals in the environment. This will undoubtedly change elephants and the world around them.

“Finally, I shot the two remaining bullets into what I thought was the heart. The blood gushed out thickly like red velvet, but it was not dead. Its body did not even twitch when it was hit by the last two shots; it was still breathing painfully. It was in great pain and was dying slowly; but it was in some world far away from me, where bullets could no longer harm it, ” wrote George Orwell in his 1936 book Shooting an Elephant.

The way elephants are slaughtered has changed little since Orwell's time.

In this still from a video by wildlife photographer Karl Amman, poachers skin an elephant for its meat and tusks in the Bangui forest in Central Africa on May 3, 2007. © Karl Amman via AP

The poachers' main weapon is the AK-47, which they often fire from helicopters, according to Pauwel de Wachter, WWF's West Africa director. But the bullets don't kill elephants right away. Once the animal is down, poachers cut the tendons in the elephant's legs to immobilize it. Sometimes they cut off the elephant's trunk, leaving it to bleed to death .

Other equally brutal reports suggest that some poachers use arrows and spears dipped in poison so that the sound of the gunfire does not attract the attention of rangers. Elephants killed like this die more slowly, and their tusks can be cut off while they are still alive. It is not difficult to imagine the pain they feel - imagine your dentist sawing off your front teeth without anesthesia.

It is these horrific memories, Poole says, that make Gorongosa's elephants so nervous and jumpy that they have a reputation as being unfriendly.

Each multigenerational elephant family, or herd, can have up to 100 members and is made up of mothers and their calves. The herd leader - usually the oldest female - holds the reins. A male elephant stays with his family until they are about 10 years old, then joins other older males. They stay in smaller all-male herds, lurking on the edges, waiting to mate.

Social signals from female herd leaders have the greatest impact on the group, and in Gorongosa, especially among elephants older than 30 who have lived through the civil war, some of whom Poole has seen with bullet holes in their ears, trust in humans has gone a long way .

🔺More than one of his Land Rovers was nearly smashed into scrap metal by a female elephant who didn't like his presence.

It's not surprising that these female elephant leaders would charge vehicles carrying people, but their attack methods may vary from group to group.

Survivor: An elephant in Zimbabwe after being shot in the head in June 2016. The elephant, named "Pretty Boy", is believed to be about 25 years old and had suffered a head wound for at least six weeks. It is thought that he may have escaped death by fleeing to the national park after being shot in the head outside the park. Rescuers took an X-ray of him and found that if the bullet had hit 5cm above the existing bullet hole, the elephant would have died. © BBC

“Different herd leaders and families use different strategies,” Poole says. In some families, only the leader will charge the vehicle—she’ll spread her ears, kick up dust, pound the ground with her curled trunk, and make piercing calls, “while the rest of the herd cheers her on.” In other families, the entire herd will act in unison, rallying together to attack as a group, with clear communication between them.

She said: " Elephants in Gorongosa still see vehicles as a threat and the new generation is emulating the behaviour of the elders. Only with time and if drivers consistently show respectful behaviour, will they realise from experience that we are harmless ."

It can be fraught with danger. Poole’s brother Bob, a wildlife filmmaker who has traveled to Gorongosa with his sister on several missions, has had more than one of his Land Rovers nearly smashed to pieces by a female elephant that didn’t like his presence. He fitted his vehicles with stainless steel exoskeletons to withstand elephant impacts, saving both his vehicles and, in some cases, his own life.

To protect against elephant attacks, Bob Poole's Land Rover is fitted with a stainless steel exoskeleton. © Bob Poole

Poole said the aggressive behavior stems directly from the elephants' experience of being hunted during the war, and similar phenomena have been seen in elephant populations elsewhere outside Gorongosa.

For example, elephants in some national parks in Kenya are wary of humans who are not in vehicles. This is because for decades, Maasai tribesmen have hunted elephants on foot with spears. This image is deeply etched in the collective memory of elephants .

So would Gorongosa's elephants be better off if we didn't intervene at all and stopped forcing them to interact with humans? Poole says no.

The desire to protect Gorongosa as a national park is based on its value for its biodiversity and its ability to generate foreign exchange for the country, while also helping to support local community projects. Without tourists, it might be argued that the land is better suited for subsistence farming, fishing and hunting.

“It will take a long time for this memory to fade,” she said, “but the responsibility for reconciliation lies with us.”

References:

[1]pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18376543/

[2]www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320719302769

[3]wwf.be/fr/actualites/sans-action-urgente-lelephant-dafrique-disparaitra-dans-20-ans

[4]cites.org/eng/news/pr/2002/021004_ivory.shtml

[5]theweek.com/articles/449437/tragic-price-ivory

[6]allafrica.com/stories/202202200051.html

[7]clubofmozambique.com/news/Mozambique-renamo-halts-closure-of-its-last-base-ossufo-in-gorongosa-231052/

[8]www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe7389

[9]europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC2760392&blobtype=pdf

[10]pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18376543/

By Charles Digges

Translated by Qiu Chuji

Proofreading/Rabbit's Light Footsteps

Original text/nautil.us/elephants-never-forget-war-367462/

This article is based on the Creative Commons License (BY-NC) and is published by Qiu Chuji on Leviathan

The article only reflects the author's views and does not necessarily represent the position of Leviathan