Is Poaching Causing Elephants to Evolve Without Tusks?
Spotting evolution can be trickier than you might think. Take African elephants. Usually they boast massively overgrown (and ever-growing) teeth—their tusks. For male elephants, these are weapons in sexual competition, but all elephants also use their tusks to scrape bark off trees, uncover roots, and dig for water during dry spells. Humans have their own use for tusks: ivory.
As a result, elephants have been subjected to , and in recent years, aggressive poaching. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, which tracks the health of species across the world, estimates that across Africa since 2007, after an uptick in poaching starting around the same time. Since 2010, of the dead elephants surveyed by an international monitoring program had been killed illegally.
