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Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

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Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#31

Post by bilekas »

estaseuropano wrote: post #16
tombert wrote: post #8

Honest question from someone who knows virtually nothing about chemistry or material science: is there a difference in quality between synthetic and natural ivory? If not, why is poaching even still a viable market?

Superstition. Elephants and tigers are not hunted for inherent qualities of their bodies, but for the belief that consumption of their parts in various ways helps health/virility/...

Superstition really seems to be one of the largest factor when it comes to animal hunting/consumption. It's ridiculous and a little bit ironic that something supposedly to bring good fortune will result in wide scale killing of animals, living earthlings.

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#32

Post by 1cvmask »

This all stemmed from the CIA (and white colonizers) involvement in creating the Mozambique civil war.

The civil war was then partially financed by selling ivory tusks. Hence the culling of the elephants with tusks. The tuskless went untouched and managed to reproduce in larger ratios.

https://www.africanexponent.com/post/4981-civil-war-in-mozam...

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#33

Post by ceejayoz »

croes wrote: post #26
officialjunk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but the tusks had a purpose to defend and now they are defenseless.

If the probability to get killed for the tusks is higher than get killed by predators then it's an advantage.

There are short-term and long-term advantages and disadvantages, though.

From the article, it sounds like this may have protected them from human predation, but there may be significant long-term negative impacts on the species due to the lack of viable male offspring.

Survive more easily for a couple generations, but go extinct as an all-female species after a couple more...

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#34

Post by [deleted] »

KiranRao0 wrote: post #22
lmilcin wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put this in context of a lot of other species who were not able to evolve a mechanism like that. The way I understand this there was likely a very small population of elephants already without tusks, maybe some kind of genetic defect that happened to be an advantage once you add greedy people into the mix. Or what else is possible is that there was one off mutation that produced small family of elephants that poacher…

I would argue what you describe is Evolution as broken into the two pieces: Genetic Drift and Natural Selection. Genetic Drift is always occurring randomly. Some elephants had a "genetic defect" to live without tusks before poaching. Some humans had the 0.1% resistance to the hypothetical super-covid before the disease. As new environmental conditions emerge (human poaching, hypothetical super-covid, etc), some genes…

[deleted]

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#35

Post by bpodgursky »

1cvmask wrote: post #32

This all stemmed from the CIA (and white colonizers) involvement in creating the Mozambique civil war. The civil war was then partially financed by selling ivory tusks. Hence the culling of the elephants with tusks. The tuskless went untouched and managed to reproduce in larger ratios. https://www.africanexponent.com/post/4981-civil-war-in-mozam...

Ivory poaching does not all stem from the Mozambique civil war.

It stems from Ivory being expensive and these countries being poor with weak policing.

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#36

Post by geoffmanning »

Ansil849 wrote: post #15

For people who are not from the region but are criticizing poaching...maybe you should make sure your own house is clean before throwing stones at others. How many people critiquing this have industrial animal farms in their country, for example? And just to be clear: I don't mean that vile acts like poaching shouldn't be criticized, I more find the hypocrisy extremely grating, especially when it comes from meat eate…

Somewhat of a good point, however, life sustains life. Not quite the same thing as killing an animal for some made up concept like money. That said, i personally don't eat mammals because i feel like they have too much in common with us, and science is learning more and more just how much so. I do eat birds and fish.

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#37

Post by slibhb »

1cvmask wrote: post #32

This all stemmed from the CIA (and white colonizers) involvement in creating the Mozambique civil war. The civil war was then partially financed by selling ivory tusks. Hence the culling of the elephants with tusks. The tuskless went untouched and managed to reproduce in larger ratios. https://www.africanexponent.com/post/4981-civil-war-in-mozam...

Your decision to ascribe responsibility to "the CIA (and white colonizers)" for starting a war but not to the people who actually kill the elephants is entirely arbitrary.

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#38

Post by ceejayoz »

Ansil849 wrote: post #15

For people who are not from the region but are criticizing poaching...maybe you should make sure your own house is clean before throwing stones at others. How many people critiquing this have industrial animal farms in their country, for example? And just to be clear: I don't mean that vile acts like poaching shouldn't be criticized, I more find the hypocrisy extremely grating, especially when it comes from meat eate…

> Sorry, but if you eat animals and yet critique poaching, then you are a hypocrite who does not give a fuck about animal welfare (because if you did, you wouldn't kill them).

"The Good Place" covered this attitude a bit, with the Doug Forcett character, and showed the horrible implications of "you can always be doing more" as a guiding principle in life.

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#39

Post by duskwuff »

nyc111 wrote: post #5

In the Science article they wrote, “Poaching resulted in strong selection that favored tusklessness amid a rapid population decline.” And, “Whole-genome scans implicated two candidate genes with known roles in mammalian tooth development (AMELX and MEP1a), including the formation of enamel, dentin, cementum, and the periodontium.” So, there was a change in the genes, but how do they connect this fact with poaching? I…

> how do they connect this fact with poaching?

Poachers kill elephants for their tusks. A poacher won't kill an elephant with partially formed or no tusks, as it has no value to them. This allows elephants with the tuskless gene to survive and eventually reproduce where other elephants would not.

Re: Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching

#40

Post by csours »

jsnell wrote: post #12

In case anyone is wondering about the size of the effect, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/wildlife-... has the numbers. Before the war, 2-4% of female elephants were tuskless. Now 32% of newly born ones are. So it's a significant change, but it's not like this property was coming out of nowhere. It started off about as common as humans having green eyes.

Evolution is an umbrella term, but in the most general form, evolution means a change in genetics in a population over time. So yes, the genetic 'option' was there before, but it is advantageous now.
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