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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

#211

Post by xwdv »

asdff wrote: post #19
gpt5 wrote: post #2

While sad as a whole, the responsiveness of evolution is beautiful in this case. It also demonstrates that human efforts to stop poaching have not been successful (otherwise this evolution wouldn’t happen), but luckily, nature responds.

Its important to realize what this "response" actually is. Nature isn't actively doing anything. You have 100 elephants, maybe 5 are typically born without tusks. Suddenly you kill the other 95 for their tusks, leaving behind those 5 to survive and reproduce and next generation, 33 of your 100 elephants are without tusks or something like that. Over time, humans are acting as a predator in the environment, driving a…

Of course, because “nature” doesn’t actually exist, it is a concept in the human mind. There is only matter and physical law. What we are simply witnessing is individuals with certain genetic traits surviving in far greater numbers than those who lack them in the current environment, and thus passing those same genes to offspring, propagating them exponentially.

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

#212

Post by throwaway69123 »

tw04 wrote: post #24
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?

This will probably be downvoted but the reality is it's because there's a ton of new money in China where they're still valuing things like Ivory culturally. There's no cultural stigma at this point. The government has banned it but the black market trade is still strong. See shark fin soup as another example.

Also if you buy the offical story of Covid it is this desire for exotic expensive animals with questionable natural medical benefits that caused the zootopic jump of Covid from bats to humans. So the real cost of this sort of trade now couldnt be higher.

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

#213

Post by AussieWog93 »

esturk wrote: post #141
bialpio wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it's only advantageous to female elephants, according to the article: "They identified two likely genes AMELX and MEP1a, which are passed from mothers to the offspring on the X chromosome. But if a disrupted gene is passed in a male elephant, the elephant dies; the female elephant would instead evolve to be born without tusks. " What would be the effect of this on male elephant population when taken to the lim…

Maybe not as much as you would think. Naturally, not all males mate and the mating ratio is not always 1:1. Take humans for example, it's been shown our ancestors comprise mostly of females in a ratio roughly 3:2 to males. That is, some male ancestor probably mated with more than one female ancestor somewhere.

>our ancestors comprise mostly of females in a ratio roughly 3:2 to males.

For anyone else wondering how this is possible on an individual level, apparently a lot of people used to reproduce with their first and second cousins.

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

#214

Post by unclekev »

engineer_22 wrote: post #165
TehCorwiz wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution IS selective breeding. The members of a species most fit for their environment are successful in procreation. The female elephants without tusks are surviving at higher rates which is resulting in more offspring with no tusks. This causes a shift in the population where a trait previously with no or little benefit becomes advantageous and the shift in genetic makeup of the whole population evolves.

But we don't commonly run around saying Arabians and Morgans are different because of evolution. Neither do we say that chihuahua's and labradors have evolved into their present form. In my humble opinion "evolution" refers to speciation, which takes very many generations.

> Neither do we say that chihuahua's and labradors have evolved into their present form.

They 'evolved' into their present forms because they were forced/accelerated by the hand of humans through selective breeding.

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

#215

Post by sriram_sun »

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.

I had a couple of questions:

Are 100% of tusked females giving birth to 32% of the newborns without a tusk?

What % of tuskless females give birth to tusked females?

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

#216

Post by seattle_spring »

Ansil849 wrote: post #205
seattle_spring wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, killing a non-endangered animal for sustenance is more acceptable than killing an endangered animal for a necklace pendant (or any other reason). Any other questions?

So you don't see the absurdity of this? At all? You're literally saying killing people is more acceptable than killing elephants.

I'm, uh, not literally saying that at all. No one kills humans for sustenance, and cattle do not have the same value as humans. The absurdity is in your PETA-fueled absolutism of giving all living beings an equal level of value.

I'm going to eat a huge, expensive steak tonight just to cancel out the energy you've put into this conversation.

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

#217

Post by ricktdotorg »

tim-- wrote: post #210
burnished wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, looks like natural selection. The article mentions that "The phenomenon of elephants going tuskless is not new. Researchers found the number of tuskless female elephants in Mozambique increased by almost double over 30 years. This overlaps with a period of civil conflict, where armed forces slaughtered 90% of the elephant population to produce ivory.". That is a LOT of selection pressure. Also, the African Eleph…

I mean this honestly, but what is the blue family that you are talking about. The first thing that springs to mind is Avatar, and Google isn't helping me out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Fugates

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

#218

Post by caf »

mulmen wrote: post #148

Is this actually evolution or just selective breeding? By killing elephants with tusks the poachers are favoring elephants with the no-tusk gene. This isn't a lot different than killing a dog that bites sheep, which is how we bred herding dogs. Or a wolf that eats your baby, which is how we domesticated dogs. This trait already existed so it certainly wasn't "engineered due to mass poaching for ivory" as claimed.

The only distinction is really that selective breeding is intentional - which is not the case here.

Was it "selective breeding" when MRSA arose due to our use of antibiotics?

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

#219

Post by aaron695 »

This is old news. It's been discussed for decades.

Generally the lack of tusks was not definitely considered due to poaching directly causing evolution/selective pressure outside of the fake news media.

ie. Genetic drift - https://blog.waikato.ac.nz/bioblog/2008/08/tuskless-elephant...

What would be interesting here is if genetics has proven it's due to selective pressure and strongly indicates poaching.

Things like removing elephant tusks from live animals (as they do) would increase tusklessness as well. You see this with polled livestock, you have to remove all horns when a few are polled else the horned animals dominate.

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