The Rhodesian armed forces lacked the manpower to effectively protect its 1,300-kilometre (800 mi) border with Mozambique against entering ZANLA insurgents. 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. Turkalo is now part of an extraordinary operation to protect the surviving forest elephants. 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. 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. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Hed grown up not far from Garamba at a time when it was possible to fly over the park and see 5,000 elephants in a single gathering. Professor Pringle said it was possible to reverse this trait over time as long as work to recover elephant populations from the brink of extinction continues. The relationship is close: SAF warns Kony if theres trouble, Onen says. We are in charge of the futures of our animals and earth and making a world for future generations to thrive in. But when I ask a gathering of children and elders in the village of Kpaika, about 30 miles from the parks western border, how many of them have visited Garamba, no one raises a hand. She had gone to Africa to do aid work, but was drawn to the intricate lives of these elephants. "I could hear the call and say, 'Yeah, that's a juvenile being pushed out of a hole by its mother; it's protesting.' Turkalo is compact and direct, and wears her dark hair pulled back in a bun. The women motored downriver toward the Democratic Republic of Congo. Do we really need to sell ivory tusks in the world just to make money? A forum for discussion about elephants and rhinos and a rally point for those who want to getinvolved. Issa, who is Chadian, said he joined the team of three Sudanese men and that together they rode more than two weeks to get to Heban, where they killed nine elephants in four days. Garamba National Park, in the northeast corner of the DRC and on the border with South Sudan, is a UNESCO World Heritage site, internationally famous for its elephants and its boundless ocean of green. EVERY SINGLE animal on this planet is special and this doesn't happen to monkeys or crocodiles or birds does it? Chad. A sixth, a young lookout, ran down the hill, disappeared, and is presumed dead. It was used to make combs, pool balls, knick-knacks, and even piano keys. Civil war drove these elephants to lose their tusksthrough evolution. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. Dry season in, rainy season out. So far theyve traveled 600 miles from jungle to desert in just under two months. COPY EDITOR: Cindy Leitner, Hear Brent Stirton tell their stories in an audioslideshow, Hear Bryan Christy discuss the investigation on. I spend a night in police custody, where Im given a desk to sleep on. 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. "You know, a lot of the NGOs, we just cut and run," she tells us matter-of-factly. After months of tinkering, Kermeens final bespoke ivory-tracking device arrives in the mail. No, I want ivory for ammunition to keep fighting, was Konys reply, according to Onen, who was listening to transmissions. Its not a secret to anyone that Konys in Sudan, says the State Departments Marty Regan. For ten years Khartoum supplied him with food, medicine, and arms, including automatic rifles, antiaircraft guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. That's painful to imagine, especially for anyone who's had the chance to watch these animals. If he can do this, Ill ask him to make several more tusks. The result was. Two genes stood out: MEP1a and AMELX, which are active in tooth development in other mammals, were present in seven elephants with tusks, but had unique mutations in 11 tuskless elephants. Researchers looked at why female elephants in Gorongosa national park in Mozambique were frequently born without tusks, and found that the animals were in effect genetically engineered by mass . They killed fewer elephants per hunt but were much harder to track and stop. We need your help to protect elephants and report on wildlife crime. This comment was removed because it broke the rules. I need Schreger lines too, George, I say, referring to the cross-hatching on the butt of a sawn tusk that looks like growth rings of a tree trunk. In Mozambique, past hunting pressure led to an increase of . Without the stress of poaching, the elephants started breeding again, and more than 40 calves have been born. The recent death toll of elephants in Garamba has been staggering, even by central African standards. In Tanzania and Mozambique, elephants . I just can't understand why anyone would want to take away any of the amazing qualities and features of an elephant. When humans hunt, they can cause their quarry to evolve by targeting individuals with particular traits, like big fish or sheep with hefty horns. Turkalo's pretty famous in the world of elephant research, as one of the first to study forest elephants. We would follow them using Google Earth. The relatives of murdered Zakouma ranger Idriss Adoum tracked one of the alleged Heban hill poachers to Sudan and arranged to have him brought back to Chad to stand trial. Five of the six men in Zakoumas Hippotrague patrol unit were killed by elephant poachers outside the park; the sixth is presumed dead. Other roads also lead to Sudan. Rogue militias and army soldiers from the DRC, Sudan, and South Sudan are slaughtering elephants in the park. I know that ivory tusks make millions of pounds but is it really worth it? 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. Another potential knock-on is changes to the broader landscape, as the study has revealed that tusked and tuskless animals eat different plants. Next, researchers wanted to pin down the mechanism of inheritance for tusklessness. One moves north toward Heban, the other west toward centralChad. 4. Now, scientists say that drove some elephants to evolve tusklessness. Later, when Labuschagne examined the trajectory of bullets at the scene, he concluded that the poachers had been trained in how to set up a cross fire, which, combined with evidence found at the scene, pointed to President Omar al-Bashirs Sudan Armed Forces. Margaret Acino was 23, pregnant, working in the fields near Gulu, Uganda, when an LRA commander called for a razor and ordered his boy soldiers to slice off her lips, ears, and nose. Instead of signing a peace agreement, Kony had his peace negotiator executed. Its hissanctuary.. But last year at the bai, she says, she feared for her life. Because there were no tuskless males, the researchers suspected the trait might be caused by genes on the x chromosome, including a dominant one for tusklessness and a recessive one lethal only to males. In 1994 Kony left Uganda and took his murderous gang on the road. Please make a tax-deductible gift today. Several Tanzanian officers who had presided over my arrest at the airport, including the wildlife expert, returned the next day to wish us bon voyage. This is a photocopy of the diary of the LRAs Lt. Col. Vincent Binany Okumu, who, defectors say, was in charge of ivory hunting in Garamba National Park. The culprits are believed to have been South Sudanese, according to African Parks. Year after year, the path to many of the biggest, most horrific elephant killings traces back to Sudan, which has no elephants left but gives comfort to foreign-born poacher-terrorists and is home to the janjaweed and other Sudanese cross-continental marauders. But we also discovered field biologist Andrea Turkalo, who's now a conservation scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society. These LRA defectorsall abducted as children and pressed into servicenow fight for the Ugandan military. I will escape from your jail, and I will kill him. He did escape, and a rumor in Zakouma is that he fled south to CAR. It was just impossible to stay. 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. After Lucienne Lanziwas husband died in an LRA attack on Garamba, she got a modest stipend. In January 2014, while x-raying a Vietnam-bound container declared to hold cashews, Togolese port authorities saw something strange: ivory. "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. Researchers at the bai learned to identify individual elephants by the shape and characteristics of their ears. HOW MANY TIMES ?? PELLETIER: The reason why that's important is because if you stop the killing right now, you know, the time it would take for the population to, you know, restore that traits would be much longer now that there's been a change in the genes than if it wasn't. Among the recent casualties was a group of rare forest elephants in the Central African Republic. I just can't understand why anyone would want to take away any of the amazing qualities and features of an elephant. Researchers are still trying to pinpoint all the genetics that underpin . I order a satellite shot of their location from DigitalGlobe, a commercial vendor of space imagery, and ask for outside help interpreting it. Beginning on Christmas Eve, his soldiers spread out in small teams and murdered civilians. Turkalo is now part of an extraordinary operation to protect the surviving forest elephants. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. Their path is consistent with the route Konys defectors tell me ivory takes on the way to the warlords Kafia Kingi base. Then they head south six miles, back into Kafia Kingi. They can get what they want today, he said, and keep it there for two, three, or even more than five years.. Bill McQuay now works as a sound engineer with the National Public Radio - National Geographic Society Radio Expeditions Sound Collection at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library. Im a problem solver., I laugh. Konys men jump back and forth across borders, hiding in countries where governance is weak. Can fake tusks with hidden GPS trackers thwartthem? The air strike, dubbed Operation Lightning Thunder, included support from the DRC, southern Sudan, and the U.S. 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. In fact, she tells us, two weeks later she went back to the bai something we found pretty astonishing given the circumstances of the civil war. Congolese soldiers undergo training by Mathieu Eckel of African Parks, an NGO that manages Garamba National Park with the DRCs parks authority. "I heard they were on their way. 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. for their tusks. As she sips her tea in the Providence coffee shop, Turkalo is the picture of calm. Embattled park rangers are often the only defense for wildlife andvillagers. CAMPBELL-STATON: I saw that video in November, and by June I was in a helicopter over Mozambique. Researchers in Mozambique found a . These jumbo foragers are masterful engineers of their surroundings. All around me I hear the click-clack of automatic weapons being loaded. Which raises the question: If ivory is poached by Sudanese, where is it going? MCCAMMON: Those changes can ripple through ecosystems. South Sudan. On our patrol we dont encounter any poachers or rebel groups. CORNISH: Consequences that are still continuing nearly 30 years after the war. Instead of being made a soldier, he was designated a signalera radioman privy to Konys secret communications. Tusk inheritance patterns in the ElephantVoices database backed up that assumption. Kony was adamant in his radio transmissions. Wittemyer wonders whether a similar phenomenon happened long ago in Asia, because both male and female fossil elephants there have tusks, but among living Asian elephants, only males have tusks. From Garamba, Kony signaled his desire for peace with Uganda, sending emissaries to neutral Juba, in southern Sudan, to negotiate with Ugandan officials while he and his men lived unmolested in and around the park, protected by a cease-fire agreement. A crowd gathers. Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. This story was originally published in the September 2015 issue of National Geographicmagazine. Veteran ranger Jean Claude Mambo Marindo sits beside almost a hundred tusks seized from elephant poachers at Garamba National Park, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In a public square in Am Timan, shortly before his trial, he shouted, I know who betrayed me! Otti liked elephants, Onen recalled, and forbade their killing. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. Its not clear why a mutated version of AMELXwhich is located on the x chromosomewould be fatal to males, but researchers suspect one or more nearby genes come along for the ride. Congos own soldiers threaten the parks southern border, and villagers around the park sometimes poach elephants too. The LRA sells to the Sudan Armed Forces, Onen said. Such genes ought to disappear, Roca says, because females that lack them would have more offspring. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Geographic certifying that theyre artificial. That evening, they floated by a village. While Dante set about embedding Kermeens tracker inside his tusk mold, a third team member, John Flaig, a specialist in near-space, balloon-based photographyimages taken from at least the height of spy planeswas preparing to monitor the tusks as they moved. The reason why the soldiers killed the elephants was to gain ammunition and arms from the money received after selling their ivory. National Geographic television producer J.J.Kelley takes the floor in the waiting area. Our next story begins in a place many of us are familiar with - up awake, watching a YouTube video at 3 in the morning. 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. Michael K. Nichols/National Geographic/Getty Images. Gathering speed, they continue north before abruptly turning east, in the direction of Khartoum. Fifty percent will be tuskless. CORNISH: So he made some calls and assembled a team. Boko Haram also uses the bush as a baseNigerias Sambisa Forest, a game reserve south of Lake Chad. Or possibly even shown up in illegal ivorys biggest consuming country:China. Track the GPS unit in an interactive map. Rogue militias and army soldiers from the DRC, Sudan, and South Sudan are slaughtering elephants in the park. Turkalo had lived through civil strife before, but this time, she tells us, it was much worse. To look for genes that might be involved, the team took blood from 18 female elephants in the park and sequenced their genomes. Five of the worlds least stable nations, as ranked by the Washington, D.C.-based organization the Fund for Peace, are home to people who travel to other countries to kill elephants. There were armed combatants roaming the countryside. To enjoy the CBBC Newsround website at its best you will need to have JavaScript turned on. The U.S. State Department named Kony a specially designated global terrorist in 2008, and the African Union has designated the LRA a terrorist organization. We'll tell you more about them Friday, on NPR's Morning Edition. Such a biased sex ratio would be expected with a recessive gene that kills males when they inherit it. The Ugandan military finally attacked Konys Garamba camps in late 2008. But instead, that morning the poachers were hiding among trees surrounding the rangers camp. Halfway through our patrol, we come upon a clearing of burned grass beside the Kassi River, the site of a recent battle between Garamba rangers and SPLA poachers, in which, rangers tell me, they killed two poachers. Calculate the percentages of the illegally killed elephants between 2007 and 2013 represented by each group of elephants in Question 3. They included South Sudanese armed forces (SPLA) and Sudanese military, as well as defectors from those militaries and an assortment of Sudan-based rebels. Editor's Note: Viewers may find the next image from the 2013 elephant slaughter disturbing. But after Otti left Garamba to participate in the peace talks, Kony began killing elephants for ivory. I arrive at what amounts to the park rangers northern front, an outpost vulnerable both to Sudanese poachers and Konys army. In this scene from the documentary Explorer: Warlords of Ivory, Bryan Christy presents world-renowned taxidermist George Dante with a new challenge: creating a completely convincing fake elephant tusk. Female elephants in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique evolved to be tuskless in response to intense hunting. But it could take a long time for tusked females to become as common as they once were. The family of Idriss Adoum (second from left) tracked one suspect to Sudan. They also had twice as many daughters as sons. With an average of 16 years in the bush with the LRA, the men bring a wealth of experience to the hunt for Kony and his fighters. At that time, about 18% of females there were born without tusks. In the morning, after officials from Tanzanias Wildlife Division and the U.S. Embassy arrive, Im released. When the American Museum of Natural History wanted to update the hall of North American mammals, taxidermist George Dante got the call. After Zakoumas rangers destroyed their camp and confiscated their equipment, the poachers were unable to return to Sudan, so three weeks later they went back to Heban hill and attacked the Hippotrague unit. Some 30,000 African elephants die each year at the hands of poachers to satisfy the global demand for ivory. They set up camp and in a four-month rampage killed up to 650 elephants. During the civil war between 1977 to 1992, poachers sold the ivory to finance the conflict, including buying arms and ammunition. "During the war, Gorongosa was essentially the geographic center of the conflict," Long said via email. In March 2006 he fled for the DRC and set up camp in Garamba National Park, then home to some 4,000 elephants. From the moment of his capture, Onen says, he was a complainer. In the United States, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama supported efforts either to arrest or kill him. And someoneits unclear whois believed to be killing elephants from helicopters, as evidenced by bullet holes in the tops of skulls and the removal of tusks by what can only be chain saws. During a civil war in the country, that lasted from 1977 to 1992, up to 90% of Mozambique's elephant population was killed, mainly for their ivory tusks. 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. 3. hide caption. "So we heard this 'rat-a-tat-tat.' When north and south Sudan signed a peace agreement in 2005, Kony lost his Sudanese host. Erik Stokstad is a reporter at Science, covering environmental issues. Theyre in a place 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the ambient temperature, so perhaps theyve been buried in the backyard. Most of these children are very, very traumatized when they come back home. They have nightmares, Sugule continues. Suddenly they move steadily north, about 12 miles a day along the border with South Sudan, avoiding all roads. Written in Acholi, it details Konys order for a hundred elephant tusks. In ten years hes never made a mistake, he says: The tusks are real. Where did the tusks end up? Father Ernest Sugule, who ministers to the village, tells me that many children in his diocese have seen family members killed by the Lords Resistance Army, or LRA, the Ugandan rebel group led by Joseph Kony, one of Africas most wanted terrorists. when will hunters get the message we need other species alive on our planet for our own species to survive . I'm outraged as to how some people have the audacity to kill these inconncent , sentient creatures who , like most animals help keep the food chain stable. Normally both male and female African elephants have tusks, which are really a pair of massive teeth. Using Kermeens technology, he could adjust how many times a day they tried to communicate with a satellite via the Internet. It was still too dangerous, Turkalo decided, so she made her escape by boat a second time. "I don't know which ones they killed," she replies. 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. - 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. "It's another example of the imprint of [human] effect on nature," says wildlife ecologist George Wittemyer of Colorado State University, who was not involved in the research. A booming Chinese middle class with an insatiable taste for ivory, crippling poverty in Africa, weak and corrupt law enforcement, and more ways than ever to kill an elephant have created a perfect storm. ". He was 22 years old the night in 1998 that Konys soldiers raided his village in Gulu, Uganda, and pulled him from his bed. By Bryan ChristyPhotographs by Brent StirtonPublished August 12, 2015. Today, poaching has stopped in Gorongosa, and the elephant population is recovering. "They recognize each other's voices," she told us in 2002, "just like women recognize their babies' cries. In 2013, Khamis Kagasheki, then Tanzanias minister of natural resources and tourism, declared that the illegal ivory trade involves rich people and politicians who have formed a very sophisticated network, and he accused four members of Tanzanias Parliament of being involved init. That's where Princeton evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton found himself a few years ago. As Somalia is to piracy, Sudan has become to elephant poaching. I didn't go looking for this. Rangers practice their riding skills at Zakouma National Park, in Chad. 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. The cook, Djimet Said (opposite), was shot but survived, walking 11 miles to the nearest village for help. Six antipoaching rangers and their cook, the entirety of the Hippotrague (French for roan antelope) unit, were awake, dressed in camouflage uniforms, and preparing for morning prayersdevoted even in the darkness. Radio Expeditions used interviews, narration, and on-location recording to bring listeners to exotic places around the world. Issa claimed he was merely a lookout, not a poacher. MCCAMMON: Campbell-Staton and his team worked with local researchers who had tracked elephants for decades. Thanks to stepped-up enforcement, the park hasnt lost an elephant to poachers since 2012. 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. Unlike Savanna elephants, forest elephants don't have natural predators, such as lions. for their meat. Use the evidence above to make a claim about the main reason elephants were illegally killed in this region. If we've learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond. Andrea Turkalo/The Elephant Listening Project, Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). 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. 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. It was just after 4 a.m. on Heban hill, in Chad, 80 miles from the Sudanese border and 60 miles northeast of Zakouma National Park, home to the countrys largest remaining elephant herd, 450 animals. I agree elephants are my favourite animals and it's unfair elephants don't cut of our noses or massively nearly ruin our species so why should we do the same to them. c. percentage of elephants killed for . DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT: Kevin DiCesare, Joel Fiser, Jaime Hritsik, Brian Jacobs. Elephant tusks are elongated incisors. It's run by a band of men who, if not exactly soldiers-of-fortune, certainly are trained warriors. 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. Was removed because it broke the rules band of men who, if not exactly soldiers-of-fortune, are!, knick-knacks, and South Sudan are slaughtering elephants in Gorongosa, and wears her dark hair back! 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