San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Tusklessness may be elephants’ saving grace
ADDO, South Africa — Through the narrow slit of the underground hide in front of the water hole, an African morning revealed itself.
The sun painted the earth orange. A lion stepped out of the bush and a small herd of perfectly camouflaged kudus, a large antelope-like animal, started and bolted away.
Soon, a single bull elephant appeared where the lion had been, shaking his head as if scanning the bush. After a while, five female elephants descended the orange hillside to drink.
Even from a distance, it was easy to tell they were females; in South Africa’s Addo Elephant National Park, they’re almost always the ones without tusks.
In most African elephant populations, as few as 2 percent of the cows lack tusks. But among Addo’s 300-odd females, the rate is 90 percent to 95 percent, a trait that has evolved rapidly over the past century.
And at least partly as a result, Addo’s elephants have also been spared something else: poaching.
“Addo elephants might be the biggest success story anywhere,” said the park’s conservation manager, John Adendorff.
“So maybe it’s not a bad thing that they don’t have tusks. Tusklessness has helped protect them,” he said.
Addo is the most dramatic example of the increase in the numbers of African elephants without tusks but not the only one.
In Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, widespread poaching during that country’s civil war in the 1970s to 1990s killed off disproportionately large numbers of elephants with tusks.
The result is that in Gorongosa, 53 percent of adult females and 35 percent of newborn females have no tusks, said Joyce Poole, an elephant biologist with the research and conservation organization Elephant Voices who has studied the animals for 43 years.
“Among females then, the poachers were preferentially killing animals with tusks and leaving tuskless ones to survive, so they were breeding and producing more tuskless offspring,” Poole said.