Ivory poaching
The crazy African ivory poaching campaign is shocking, and what kind of evil consequences will be produced after that?
1- African elephant (male) 2 - African elephant (female); 3- Asian elephant (male) 4 - Asian elephant (female)
We have the impression that African elephants, both male and female, grow long tusks, while Asian elephants are only male elephants, and although the female elephants are also long, they do not appear outward. Compared to Asian elephants, the situation faced by African elephants looks much worse, and after the crazy poaching of ivory, African elephants began to choose not to grow teeth. Normally, tusks are important for the survival of African elephants, and with tusks they can dig groundwater or peel the bark of trees, which is part of their diet. But if the external living environment deteriorates, tusks may be hunted, and for them, survival means abandoning ivory, a powerful feeding tool.
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In Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, a toothless mother African elephant protects her family
It stands to reason that African elephants do not have teeth, which is very rare. However, in specific regions, the proportion of African elephants not having teeth is much higher than average. In one study, about 2,500 African elephants lived in gorongosa national park in Mozambique, Africa, in the 1970s, aerial photographs found that about 18 percent of elephants had no two tusks and 9 percent lacked one. Then, in 1977, when civil war broke out in Mozambique, the monitoring and survey of the elephant population did not resume until 2000, and the results were shocking, at this time less than 250 African elephants remained in the national park to survive the war, but more than 50% of African elephants no longer had tusks, which is three times that of before the war. What causes this? One can't help but suspect two things – one is that the local area relied heavily on the ivory trade for funding during the war, and the other is that elephants have migrated from here and fled.
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Follow-up studies have found a prominent phenomenon: elephants that do not have teeth are all female elephants. What's going on here? In order to explore the root causes, we can only study the first generation of elephants that survived the war to see if they and their parents have ivory, and the results are very surprising:
(1) The small male elephants born to the surviving toothless female elephants all grow tusks, but 50% of the baby female elephants born do not grow tusks with their mothers.
(2) For the entire herd, the probability of whether the baby elephant born of the female elephant is almost equal. However, in the case of toothless female elephants, one-third of the children born are small male elephants and two-thirds are small female elephants.
Why? The root cause is still in the mutated toothless gene. Female elephants, like humans, carry two X chromosomes, and one of the two X chromosomes of a toothless mother elephant contains a mutated toothless gene and the other is normal, other than this, the elephant's health seems to have little effect. For male elephants, their X and Y chromosomes are normal.
Because in the small female elephant born, if she inherits the normal X chromosome of her parents at the same time, she will grow ivory, and if she inherits the abnormal X chromosome of her mother, she will no longer grow ivory. But this is not the case for the baby male elephant, if it inherits the father's Y chromosome and the mother's abnormal X chromosome, then they will not wait for birth, they will stillbirth. This explains the imbalance in the sex ratio of the baby elephant above, which will change from 2:2 to 1:2.
The researchers found that the odontating mother elephant's abnormal X chromosome has two genes that may cause no tusks, AMELX and MEP1a, where the AMELX gene is associated with the development of the elephant's teeth. If this situation continues, in theory, the proportion of toothless in the African elephant population will become higher and higher, and will this population gradually die out as the proportion of normal bull elephants gradually decreases? That's something people worry about.
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But concerns can be superfluous. Because since 1994, the population of African elephants in Mozambique has gradually increased, and there is a good phenomenon - although toothless mother elephants exist, their fertility is not as good as normal toothless mother elephants, so in the long run, the edentula rate of African elephants is decreasing year by year. In this way, the African elephants in The Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, both male and female, are expected to gradually return to their former glory with teeth.
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While we are optimistic about the fact that African elephants grow tusks, poaching persists, and it is undeniable that this is one of the factors that led African elephants to "strategically" choose not to grow tusks, whether the elephant herd is smart or not, and whether they actively or passively choose to give up growing tusks. There is a public service advertisement that says "no trade, no killing", so @Engineer Tianzhang strongly appeals that the same beings on the earth, treat every population kindly, and no longer consume ivory products, in order to solve the problem from the root.