Solving a tuskless riddle

WASHINGTON—A hefty set of tusks is usually an advantage for elephants, allowing them to dig for water, strip bark for food and joust with other elephants. But during episodes of intense ivory poaching, those big incisors become a liability.

Now researchers have pinpointed how years of civil war and poaching in Mozambique have led to a greater proportion of elephants that will never develop tusks.

During the conflict from 1977 to 1992, fighters on both sides slaughtered elephants for ivory to finance war efforts. In the region that’s now Gorongosa National Park, around 90 per cent of the elephants were killed.

The survivors were likely to share a key characteristic: half the females were naturally tuskless — they simply never developed tusks — while before the war, less than a fifth lacked tusks.

Like eye colour in humans, genes are responsible for whether elephants inherit tusks from their parents. Although tusklessness was once rare in African savannah elephants, it’s become more common — like a rare eye colour becoming widespread.

After the war, those tuskless surviving females passed on their genes with expected, as well as surprising, results. About half their daughters were tuskless. More perplexing, two-thirds of their offspring were female.

The years of unrest “changed the trajectory of evolution in that population,” said evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton, based at Princeton University.

With colleagues, he set out to understand how the pressure of the ivory trade had tipped the scale of natural selection. Their findings were published Thursday in the journal Science.

Researchers in Mozambique, including biologists Dominique Goncalves and Joyce Poole, observed the national park ’s roughly 800 elephants over several years to create a catalogue of mothers and offspring.

“Female calves stay by their mothers, and so do males up to a certain age,” said Poole, who is scientific director of the non-profit ElephantVoices.

Their genetic analysis revealed two key parts of the elephants’ DNA that they think play a role in passing on the trait of tusklessness.

“They’ve produced the smoking-gun evidence for genetic changes,” said Chris Darimont, a conservation scientist at the University of Victoria in Canada, who was not involved in the research. The work “helps scientists and the public understand how our society can have a major influence on the evolution of other life forms.”

Now the scientists are studying what more tuskless elephants means for the species and its savannah environment. Their preliminary analysis of fecal samples suggests the Gorongosa elephants are shifting their diet, without long incisors to peel bark from trees.