African elephants in the Gomoti Plains area on the edge of the Gomoti river system southeast of the Okavango Delta, Botswana. Photo: Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images
Ivory poaching in Mozambique led to a "rapid evolution" of tuskless African elephants, according to a study published Thursday in Science magazine.
Driving the news: Years of poaching in Mozambique has led to a greater proportion of elephants that will never develop tusks, which are used by the animals to dig for water and strip bark for food, according to the Associated Press.
- During the Mozambican civil war from 1977 to 1992, fighters slaughtered elephants for ivory to support war efforts, leading to the reduction of elephants with tusks, per AP.
- After the war, half of the females were naturally tuskless, while before the war, less than a fifth lacked tusks. The elephant population as a whole decreased by more than 90% due to the war, according to researchers.
Between the lines: The significant reduction in the elephant population after the war "resulted in a phenotype of the species that had a better chance of survival — specifically, female elephants," ABC News reports.
- The tuskless female elephants passed on their genes, resulting in about half of the elephants being tuskless, and about two-thirds of the offspring being female, per AP.
What they're saying: The years of unrest "changed the trajectory of evolution in that population," evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton said, per AP.
- "When we think about natural selection, we think about it happening over hundreds, or thousands, of years," Samuel Wasser, a conservation biologist at the University of Washington said, per AP.
- "The fact that this dramatic selection for tusklessness happened over 15 years is one of the most astonishing findings."