Katy Payne/The Elephant Listening Project A few days later the tusks proceed to Songo, the Sudanese market town where Onen said Konys men trade ivory. We protect the park to give the people something of value. He fights for elephants because he knows that without the animals presence, no one will support Garamba, and the parkwhich he calls Africas heartwill be lost. Five of the six men in Zakoumas Hippotrague patrol unit were killed by elephant poachers outside the park; the sixth is presumed dead. The Central African Republic was peaceful back then. In June the Tanzanian government announced that the country has lost 60 percent of its elephants in the past five years, down from 110,000 to fewer than 44,000. Poaching has been curbed in Chads Zakouma National Park, but rebuilding the parks herd, now at 450, will take years. She turned her life around to be near them, settling in a rough camp in the rainforest and building an observation platform where she could safely watch the animals that congregate there. The men of the Hippotrague unit assumed that after the previous teams raid, the poachers had all fled home. Instead of being made a soldier, he was designated a signalera radioman privy to Konys secret communications. Although the adaptation comes with a pricean associated genetic mutation kills male elephants before they're bornthe emerging trait may have helped save the population. Learn more about the Explorer series. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Tusklessness became more common in the female elephants of Mozambique 's Gorongosa National Park after rampant ivory poaching during the country's 15-year civil war. Ive flown from Garamba park headquarters to a dirt airstrip deep inside the park to join an antipoaching patrol. - during that 15-year period had all these cascading consequences, all the way up from, you know, a single gene to an entire ecosystem health. The last time an elephant was recorded killed by a poacher in Mozambique's Niassa Reserve was May 17, 2018, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society, a New York -based nonprofit that helps the Mozambican government manage the national reserve. It also raises many questions. I wonder if Konys men are out there now. Konys army had arrived in Garamba in 2006 with little ammunition left to continue its war, Onen tells me. TEXT EDITOR: Oliver Payne. In ten years hes never made a mistake, he says: The tusks are real. Most illegal ivory goes to China, where a pair of ivory chopsticks can bring more than a thousand dollars and carved tusks sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Its only the ivory that will make the LRA strong, he recalls Konysaying. After three weeks the tusks turn north again, back into Sudan. Campbell-Staton points out that other species in Gorongosa rely on elephants having tusks to dig up holes for water and strip bark from trees. Here a ranger unit is permanently deployed to protect one of the parks most important assets: a radio tower that was being built. No one has. HOW MANY TIMES ?? The reason why the soldiers killed the elephants was to gain ammunition and arms from the money received after selling their ivory. "So we heard this 'rat-a-tat-tat.' He wasnt contrite. I unzip my suitcase to expose two fake tusks and hand him letters from the U.S. Like much of the world, George Dante knows that the African elephant is under siege. They shot 26 elephants and cut out their tusks. Fifty percent of her sons will be tusked, but that other 50% would die. Zakouma National Park has lost nearly 90 percent of its elephants since 2002. But ammunition is in perilously short supplynot even enough for basic trainingand the rangers largest weapon, a belt-fed machine gun, tends to jam every third round or so. The UN estimated that the massacre displaced more than a hundred thousand Congolese and Sudanese. But it failed to rout Kony or his leadership. On January 2, 2009, the horror bled into Garambas headquarters, at Nagero, where Kony soldiers burned the park rangers main building, destroyed equipment, and killed at least eight rangers and staff members. Soumaine Abdoulaye Issa had been in Darfur, he told a team of African Parks investigators, when he heard about an elephant poaching mission to Chad led by a member of the Sudan Armed Forces. They can get what they want today, he said, and keep it there for two, three, or even more than five years.. They found that the tuskless trait was genetic, found in the X chromosome, and it was deadly in males. The poaching issue is a governance issue, Froment says. Poachers killed at least 132 last year, and as of this June, rangers had discovered another 42 carcasses with bullet holes, more than 30 attributed to a single Sudanese poaching expeditiona combined loss amounting to more than 10 percent of the parks entire population of elephants, estimated now to be no more than about 1,500. MCCAMMON: Those changes can ripple through ecosystems. Money is available to outfit the rangers with better equipment, but buying new weapons requires formal approval of the Congolese army, something Froment has been unable to get. EVERY SINGLE animal on this planet is special and this doesn't happen to monkeys or crocodiles or birds does it? Embattled park rangers are often the only defense for wildlife andvillagers. Our airport incident was one of many hiccups with the artificial tusks. We meet in a busy coffee shop full of students from nearby Brown University. Issa claimed he was merely a lookout, not a poacher. Katy Payne/The Elephant Listening Project, Former Commando Turns Conservationist To Save Elephants Of Dzanga Bai. Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. Three more are classified as of importance to watch: Angola, Cambodia, and Laos. My artificial tusks sit motionless for several weeks, a pair of tear-shaped blue dots on my computer screen, which displays a digital map of the eastern corner of CAR. for their meat. That's painful to imagine, especially for anyone who's had the chance to watch these animals. Ive met more than a thousand children who have been abducted, he says as we talk inside his church in the nearby town of Dungu. Despite Sudans role as a safe haven for groups known to traffic ivory, such as the LRA, janjaweed, and other poaching gangs, the country has drawn limited official attention as a poaching state. Jensen, who was executive producer of the series, and Alex Chadwick, chief correspondent, insisted on the highest quality sound recording to complement its reporting. Villagers sometimes taunt returned children with the same expression used for Konys men: LRA Tongo Tongo. LRA Cut Cuta reference, Sugule explains, to the militants vicious use ofmachetes. A global march demanding action to stop elephant and rhino poaching will be held . After Sudanese poachers killed his ranger father, Adoum refused diya, a traditional community payment. It was used to make combs, pool balls, knick-knacks, and even piano keys. But Turkalo decided not to leave the region right away. "I can never get too emotionally attached to things there," she says of central Africa, "because otherwise you set yourself up for a lot of disappointment. Albert Roca, a geneticist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, calls the shift striking in its speedand because it is driven by people. To identify the elephants, Turkalo learned to draw the animals' ears each ear's shape and markings are unique to each individual. My tusks will have to act like ivory. After more than an hour of animated debate, they phone the airports wildlife expert. In Songo the tusks are held for three days in what looks like a clearing outside town. Fish and Wildlife Service. Quintin Kermeen, 51, based in Concord, California, has the credentials, and the personality, Im looking for. All creatures should live in harmony! The elephants coat themselves in red clay. Gorongosa - that's a national park in Mozambique. They used Historical records to collect height (estimated to the shoulder), tusk length, and tusk circumference from approximately 600 elephants that were culled in Tsavo East National Park (Kenya) and Mkomazi National Park (Tanzania) between 1966 and 1968. It was reassuring to find the Tanzanian law enforcers so vigilant, because the country is plagued by perhaps the worst elephant poaching in Africa, and corruption is rife. Ivory shops in Khartoum advertise in English and Chinese as well as Arabic. Rogue militias and army soldiers from the DRC, Sudan, and South Sudan are slaughtering elephants in the park. Elephant tusks are elongated incisors. Another potential knock-on is changes to the broader landscape, as the study has revealed that tusked and tuskless animals eat different plants. I find a human skull fragment, and I nearly pick up a live hand grenade near where the SPLA had camped, mistaking it for a baby tortoise. In the morning, after officials from Tanzanias Wildlife Division and the U.S. Embassy arrive, Im released. Click the arrow below to hear the amazing audio tale they brought home. A welcome sight returns to Zakouma: babies. "And there was moonlight and I could see he had a revolver and he might have been drinking. Soldiers killed elephants for their ivory tusks, which were extremely valuable. DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT: Kevin DiCesare, Joel Fiser, Jaime Hritsik, Brian Jacobs. RENAMO also had imposed a system it called Gamdira whereby villagers were required to produce food, transport goods and ammunition, and village women were forced to be sex slaves. To gain more troops it recruited civilians into its armyincluding child soldersafter mass abductions. Such a biased sex ratio would be expected with a recessive gene that kills males when they inherit it. Please make a tax-deductible gift today. In Mozambique, past hunting pressure led to an increase of . For ten years Khartoum supplied him with food, medicine, and arms, including automatic rifles, antiaircraft guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. Radio Expeditions used interviews, narration, and on-location recording to bring listeners to exotic places around the world. VIDEO: J.J. Kelley, NG Studios. Since the 1980s, and beginning in Uganda, Konys minions are alleged to have killed tens of thousands of people, slicing the lips, ears, and breasts off women, raping children and women, chopping off the feet of those caught riding bicycles, and kidnapping young boys to create an army of child soldiers who themselves grow into killers. CORNISH: The upshot, which they published this week in the journal Science, is that females without tusks are pretty likely to have tuskless babies, which is why the trait was becoming so prevalent. Seleka and its rival, anti-Balaka, have set fire to people, thrown them off bridges, and murdered people wantonly, turning CAR into a lawless statethe kind of place where Konys group and other terrorist organizations thrive. They shift a few miles. The park has four mounted ranger teams because horses are the only way to effectively patrol during the wet season, when the elephants head to drier land outside the park. When the American Museum of Natural History wanted to update the hall of North American mammals, taxidermist George Dante got the call. CORNISH: You see; while most African elephants have tusks, some female African elephants are born without them and never grow them. From March 2014 to March 2015, Garambas rangers recorded 31 contacts with armed poachers, more than half of whom were with groups traveling south from the direction of South Sudan and Sudan. If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. b. percentage of elephants killed . ", Andrea Turkalo sketched the ears and other details of the elephants she studied to help identify them. When north and south Sudan signed a peace agreement in 2005, Kony lost his Sudanese host. a. percentage of elephants killed . It was still too dangerous, Turkalo decided, so she made her escape by boat a second time. That evening, they floated by a village. Ugandan soldiers with the African Unions Regional Task Force hunt for LRA leader Joseph Kony in the Central African Republic (CAR), pulling themselves along ropes to cross rivers. Turkalo is back in the U.S. now, living near Providence, R.I. She had to flee Africa last year because of the civil war in the country that is home to the elephants she shared a life with. Tusklessness, according to a new paper in Science, can be attributed in large part to a dominant mutation on the X chromosome a genetic change that also explains the sex skew Poole saw. When Ele, a female elephant, died, other elephants approached one-by-one and touched their trunks to the body. 3. Turkalo is now part of an extraordinary operation to protect the surviving forest elephants. "There's such a blizzard of depressing news about biodiversity and humans in the environment and I think it's important to emphasise that there are some bright spots in that picture. Six years later, on October 25, 2014, Onen tells me, his poaching mission to Garamba was scheduled to deliver its ivory to Kony in Sudan. CAMPBELL-STATON: You know, people during the Mozambican Civil War were not thinking about the evolution of elephants, I imagine, in the slightest. Then, like a bobber in a fishing hole, a nibble. Researchers in Mozambique found a . But after Otti left Garamba to participate in the peace talks, Kony began killing elephants for ivory. 4. Elephants without tusks were normally left alone by hunters, so this made it more likely they would breed and pass on the tuskless trait to their children. It was just impossible to stay. Ongwen also said that Kony intends to form a squad to establish contact with Boko Haram, the Nigerian terrorist group responsible for widespread killings and the kidnappings of hundreds of Nigerian women and schoolgirls. We meet over Skype. Geli Oh perks up at the word elephant. She saw many elephants in Garamba National Park, she says, which is where the LRA took her. The story typically would have ended with the wanton killing of these park rangers protecting elephants. Get more great content like this delivered right to you! A white elephant is a valuable item that has a rate that perhaps surpasses its usefulness. In March 2015 Boko Harams leader, Abubakar Shekau, pledged allegiance to ISIS, and his group was renamed Islamic States West Africa Province, giving that Middle East terrorist group a foothold in WestAfrica. Ivory operates as a savings account for Kony, says Marty Regan, of the U.S. State Departments Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. "The people on the shore, they started discharging their automatic weapons in the air," she remembers. We would follow them using Google Earth. (Special thanks to the National Public Radio - National Geographic Society Radio Expeditions Sound Collection at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, for sharing the audio.). From the moment of his capture, Onen says, he was a complainer. It is believed they do this either to cool themselves off or as a reaction to the annoyance of parasites of the skin. His control is absolute.. An adviser to the Ugandan military rejects the helicopter accusation, and suggests that the elephants might have been shot in the top of the head after they were down. In a public square in Am Timan, shortly before his trial, he shouted, I know who betrayed me! This find suggests the mutation for tusklessness may kill male elephants, per the New York Times. They included South Sudanese armed forces (SPLA) and Sudanese military, as well as defectors from those militaries and an assortment of Sudan-based rebels. As Somalia is to piracy, Sudan has become to elephant poaching. 75/129 = 58.1%. At the sound of a twig cracking or the detection of an unexpected scent on the wind, a ranger in front of me, Agoyo Mbikoyo, signals caution, and I drop with the team into a collective crouch and wait silently. Im a problem solver., I laugh. So did the African Union military forces, whose CAR-based men in Obo are tasked with finding Kony. Sudan is not on these lists, even though Sudanese poachers are a primary reason elephants are killed in several of the countries listed by CITES as of primary or secondary concern. To her relief, the men turned out to be local. Konys men jump back and forth across borders, hiding in countries where governance is weak. Since the 2008-09 attack by Konys soldiers, rangers have finished building a new headquarters and acquired two airplanes and a helicopter. The rangers also recovered a stamped Sudanese army leave slip granting three soldiers permission to travel from Darfur to a town near the Chadian border. So why elephants? A forum for discussion about elephants and rhinos and a rally point for those who want to getinvolved. That members of the Sudanese military trade arms for ivory with the LRA raises questions about the highest levels of Sudans government. Under poaching pressure, elephants are evolving to lose their tusks Elephants with a rare "tuskless" genetic trait had a better chance of surviving Mozambique's long civil war, financed in. "I don't know which ones they killed," she replies. In May 2013 poachers with the insurgent group Seleka massacred 26 elephants at Dzanga Bai, amineral-rich watering hole in CAR. Science and AAAS are working tirelessly to provide credible, evidence-based information on the latest scientific research and policy, with extensive free coverage of the pandemic. Otti was furious, Onen says. As she sips her tea in the Providence coffee shop, Turkalo is the picture of calm. But Onen got his way. After months of tinkering, Kermeens final bespoke ivory-tracking device arrives in the mail. I know that ivory tusks make millions of pounds but is it really worth it? According to Col. Mike Kabango, of the African Union forces, the image shows a large tent and two smaller ones; to Ryan Stage, a remote-sensing specialist in Colorado, it shows a large truck and two small tents. The relationship is close: SAF warns Kony if theres trouble, Onen says. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Or will they go nowhere, discovered before theyre moved and turned in by an honest person? Learn more about the Explorer series. So we Bill McQuay and Chris Joyce, who've worked together on stories from the mountains of China to the copper mines of Michigan recently decided to go see Turkalo and find out what happened. This story launches the National Geographic Societys Special Investigations Unit, which will report on wildlife crimes. 5. 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