Learn more about the Explorer series. Turkalo had lived through civil strife before, but this time, she tells us, it was much worse. Maybe I could get my fake tusks to Konytoo. After Lucienne Lanziwas husband died in an LRA attack on Garamba, she got a modest stipend. Elephants without tusks were normally. Soldiers killed elephants for their ivory tusks, which were extremely valuable. In March 2006 he fled for the DRC and set up camp in Garamba National Park, then home to some 4,000 elephants. 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. The story typically would have ended with the wanton killing of these park rangers protecting elephants. In 1978, the elephant was listed as threatened under the United States' Endangered Species Act. Instead of being made a soldier, he was designated a signalera radioman privy to Konys secret communications. During the same period, neighboring Mozambique is reported to have lost 48 percent of its elephants. Forest elephants linger on a misty morning at the Dzanga bai. Garamba is managed through a partnership between the DRCs wildlife department and African Parks, a group based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Its easier to live with things, she says. The study is extremely thorough and ticks off all the boxes, Roca says. CAMPBELL-STATON: But then I realized that there wasn't actually a lot of empirical data about what the response was from, you know, what the genetic basis of the trait was. The men of the Hippotrague unit assumed that after the previous teams raid, the poachers had all fled home. When in 2008 the Wildlife Conservation Society introduced a surveillance airplane, poaching declined, but Sudanese marauders adapted, returning in hit squads of under six men, who infiltrated from outside the park on one-day hunts. We are in charge of the futures of our animals and earth and making a world for future generations to thrive in. On September 11, 2014, Michael Onen, a sergeant in Konys army, walked out of Garamba National Park carrying an AK-47, five magazines of ammunition, and a story. When north and south Sudan signed a peace agreement in 2005, Kony lost his Sudanese host. According to Cline Sissler-Bienvenu, Francophone Africa director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, who led a group into the park after the slaughter, the poachers were most likely from Darfurs Rizeigat tribal group, with ties to the janjaweedthe violent, Sudanese-government-backed militias that have committed atrocities in Darfur. 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). To test ivory, dealers will scratch a tusk with a knife or hold a lighter under it; ivory is a tooth and wont melt. Now, researchers report this intense hunting dramatically altered a major elephant population there, favoring female elephants born without tusks. National Geographic commissioned the creation of artificial tusks with hidden GPS trackers that were planted in the smuggling supplychain. He said: "We actually expect that this syndrome will decrease in frequency in our study population, provided that the conservation picture continues to stay as positive as it has been recently. Despite their lack of tusks, it's often the females who can be seen defending the herd. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). c. percentage of elephants killed for . Thanks to stepped-up enforcement, the park hasnt lost an elephant to poachers since 2012. It was just impossible to stay. We plunge eight hours through elephant grass so tall and thick its possible to get lost just 20 feet from the man in front of youdown grass ravines, up hills exposed to the enemy, across a murky, waist-deep pond. Its hissanctuary.. It's nothing extraordinary for humans. For example, tuskless motherswho would have had one copy of the dominant tuskless gene, from their own mothershad the same number of daughters with and without tusks. Tusklessness, according to a new paper in Science, can be attributed in large part to a dominant mutation on the X chromosome a genetic change that also explains the sex skew Poole saw. He designed a GPS tracker that the U.S. Geological Survey embedded in live Burmese pythons to monitor the invasive snakes in the Florida Everglades. Officials are pointing fingers and arguing. The poaching issue is a governance issue, Froment says. Its rare that you get such a dramatic example, says co-author Robert Pringle, an ecologist at Princeton. The women motored downriver toward the Democratic Republic of Congo. The culprits are believed to have been South Sudanese, according to African Parks. Now, says the parks director, Rian Labuschagne, of African Parks, my biggest fear is that theyll start coming in pairs.. It's run by a band of men who, if not exactly soldiers-of-fortune, certainly are trained warriors who can deal not just with poachers, but with civil war, too. After more than an hour of animated debate, they phone the airports wildlife expert. 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. Another potential knock-on is changes to the broader landscape, as the study has revealed that tusked and tuskless animals eat different plants. During those years Sudanese poachers arrived in groups of more than a dozen armed men, camping inside the park for months at a time, killing, in one instance, 64 elephants in a single hunt. Earlier this year Kony suffered the defection of his commander of operations, Dominic Ongwen, who told African Union forces that Konys desire for ivory was reinforced by Seleka. An official in Dar es Salaams international airport, in Tanzaniaone of several countries I scouted for launching my tusks into the illegal tradesquints at an x-ray screen as my luggage rolls through hisscanner. On some days more then 100 elephants at at a time visit the clearing. Back in 1969 Gorongosa National Park was home to over 2200 elephants, but now there is just over 700 in the park. "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. 3. Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project, Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. Together we can make a difference. Fifty percent of her sons will be tusked, but that other 50% would die. I just can't understand why anyone would want to take away any of the amazing qualities and features of an elephant. 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. 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. "Not only do they recognize each other's calls, but the calls go far," she told NPR correspondent Alex Chadwick, who spent days with her back then, observing the elephants with Bill McQuay. "We gave them a little money and said the Seleka were coming," says Turkalo. 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. Issa claimed he was merely a lookout, not a poacher. Otti liked elephants, Onen recalled, and forbade their killing. Suddenly they move steadily north, about 12 miles a day along the border with South Sudan, avoiding all roads. Meanwhile, according to Onen, Konys men hid ivory by burying it in the ground or submerging it in rivers. The relationship is close: SAF warns Kony if theres trouble, Onen says. We were expecting to find an amazing new world of sound to record, and the experience lived up to its reputation the insects, the tropical downpours, and of course the cacophony of the elephants themselves. Normally both male and female African elephants have tusks, which are really a pair of massive teeth. Sudan is not on these lists, even though Sudanese poachers are a primary reason elephants are killed in several of the countries listed by CITES as of primary or secondary concern. Turkalo is compact and direct, and wears her dark hair pulled back in a bun. Tusk inheritance patterns in the ElephantVoices database backed up that assumption. The biggest is why a dominant gene associated with deadly effects for males would persist in the population during periods without poaching. Ugandan forces killed Binany in 2013 and recovered thediary. 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. They used Historical records to collect height (estimated to the shoulder), tusk length, and tusk circumference from approximately 600 elephants that were culled in Tsavo East National Park (Kenya) and Mkomazi National Park (Tanzania) between 1966 and 1968. Beginning on Christmas Eve, his soldiers spread out in small teams and murdered civilians. Campbell-Staton points out that other species in Gorongosa rely on elephants having tusks to dig up holes for water and strip bark from trees. Other roads also lead to Sudan. Use the evidence above to make a claim about the main reason elephants were illegally killed in this region. After months of tinkering, Kermeens final bespoke ivory-tracking device arrives in the mail. These jumbo foragers are masterful engineers of their surroundings. Their own families are afraid that theyre devils, or forever soldiers, who might kill them in the night. Konys force has declined from a peak of 2,700 combatants in 1999 to an estimated 150 to 250 core fighters today. a. percentage of elephants killed only for their meat 19/129 = 14.7% b. percentage of elephants killed only for their tusks 75/129 = 58.1% c. percentage of elephants killed for both their tusks and meat 27/129 = 20.9% 5. I know that ivory tusks make millions of pounds but is it really worth it? I arrive at what amounts to the park rangers northern front, an outpost vulnerable both to Sudanese poachers and Konys army. FANIE PELLETIER: It's one of the most detailed example of how human activity can influence the genes of a population. Five of the six men in Zakoumas Hippotrague patrol unit were killed by elephant poachers outside the park; the sixth is presumed dead. These soldiers are tasked with helping rangers fight poachers and armed groups like theLRA. CORNISH: So he made some calls and assembled a team. 4. Katy Payne/The Elephant Listening Project Diya is for accidents, he says. "So we heard this 'rat-a-tat-tat.' EVERY SINGLE animal on this planet is special and this doesn't happen to monkeys or crocodiles or birds does it? All creatures should live in harmony! Elephants without tusks were normally left alone by hunters, so this made it more likely they would breed and pass on the tuskless trait to their children. Poaching has been curbed in Chads Zakouma National Park, but rebuilding the parks herd, now at 450, will take years. Schreger lines, he says. Its 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. Researchers at the bai learned to identify individual elephants by the shape and characteristics of their ears. The family of Idriss Adoum (second from left) tracked one suspect to Sudan. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. Ranger Dieudonn Kumboyo Kobango, standing with his son, Genekpio, who escaped soon after the LRA seized him, says, I search for the LRA on every patrol.. Without the stress of poaching, the elephants started breeding again, and more than 40 calves have been born. The focus of the series was on nature, diverse cultures, and endangered environments.Its intent, according its creator Carolyn Jensen, who passed away in 2010, was to give listeners the sound equivalent of National Geographic photos. 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. Albert Roca, a geneticist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, calls the shift striking in its speedand because it is driven by people. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. Ivory operates as a savings account for Kony, says Marty Regan, of the U.S. State Departments Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. Although the adaptation comes with a pricean associated genetic mutation kills male elephants before they're bornthe emerging trait may have helped save the population. The rangers Im going out with have each been allocated a handful of rounds for old and unreliable AK-47s, most of them seized from poachers. The recent death toll of elephants in Garamba has been staggering, even by central African standards. Theyre looting communities, enslaving people, and killing park rangers who get in their way. We meet in a busy coffee shop full of students from nearby Brown University. November 6, 1954, Page 3 Buy Reprints. Eight more are considered of secondary concern: Cameroon, Congo, the DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Mozambique, and Nigeria. Sudan is also a well-documented supplier of ivory to Egypt and is the recipient of substantial Chinese infrastructure investment, which typically comes with Chinese workers, a source of ivory smuggling in many parts of Africa. When ivory poachers target elephants, the hunters can affect more than just animal numbers. only . Dry season in, rainy season out. Soldiers Kill Wild Elephant. Meanwhile, flouting the cease-fire, his men crossed into CAR, where they kidnapped hundreds of children and made sex slaves of women they brought back to the park. 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. Or possibly even shown up in illegal ivorys biggest consuming country:China. 'Everybody out, everybody out.' So support charities who put a stop to that. When the tortoise Lonesome George, emblem of the Galpagos Islands, died, it was Dante who was tasked with restoring him. During the Mozambican civil war, both sides financed their efforts by poaching elephants for ivory. Next, researchers wanted to pin down the mechanism of inheritance for tusklessness. As she sips her tea in the Providence coffee shop, Turkalo is the picture of calm. His control is absolute.. No one has. A global march demanding action to stop elephant and rhino poaching will be held . Eventually, more than four tons was found, Africas largest seizure since the global ivory trade ban took effect in 1990. ", "We got into a boat; we went downriver," Turkalo says. Quintin Kermeen, 51, based in Concord, California, has the credentials, and the personality, Im looking for. The teams cook, also wounded, struggled 11 miles to get help. "As a result there were large numbers of soldiers in the area and a lot of associated. Written in Acholi, it details Konys order for a hundred elephant tusks. Then they head south six miles, back into Kafia Kingi. 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 . ", But Turkalo's 22 years with those elephants came to a disastrous end last year, when civil war in the republic found its way to the Dzanga bai. Turkalo is now part of an extraordinary operation to protect the surviving forest elephants. Turkalo is now part of an extraordinary operation to protect the surviving forest elephants. 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. First, Campbell-Staton wanted to make sure the proportion of tuskless elephants in Mozambique had indeed changed. All rights reserved. Konys men jump back and forth across borders, hiding in countries where governance is weak. Im a problem solver., I laugh. By 1913, the African elephant population had dropped to an estimated 10 million. From the moment of his capture, Onen says, he was a complainer. You must be a real animal lover, I say. 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. a. percentage of elephants killed . A sixth, a young lookout, ran down the hill, disappeared, and is presumed dead. Erik Stokstad is a reporter at Science, covering environmental issues. South Sudan. National Geographic needs your help to protect elephants and to continue reporting on wildlife crime. Which raises the question: If ivory is poached by Sudanese, where is it going? In March 2015 Boko Harams leader, Abubakar Shekau, pledged allegiance to ISIS, and his group was renamed Islamic States West Africa Province, giving that Middle East terrorist group a foothold in WestAfrica. National Geographic television producer J.J.Kelley takes the floor in the waiting area. This limited the trade of some ivory, but trade still continued across the world. In May 2013 poachers with the insurgent group Seleka massacred 26 elephants at Dzanga Bai, amineral-rich watering hole in CAR. only . The dogs are Belgian Malinois shepherds, famed for their use in military operations, especially in tough conditions like the dense central African bush. Onen is short and looks even smaller wearing a camouflage-patterned Ugandan army uniform thats too long for him in the sleeves. Widows now get a sum equal to six years of a rangers salary. 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. In Tanzania and Mozambique, elephants . ". In this scene from the documentary Explorer: Warlords of Ivory, a screener at Tanzanias airport accuses Bryan Christy of smuggling. She's bundled in a heavy coat rarely needed during her years in the African bush. Thousands of elephants die each year so that their tusks can be carved into religious objects. My interpretation, says Jean Marc Froment, then director of the park, is that the Ugandan military is conducting operations inside Garamba and at the same time taking some ivory. But, he adds, the poachers could be SPLA, which uses the same type of helicopter seen over the park. By Jake Buehler. Elephant ivory is a key source of funding for armed groups in central Africa . I make a mental note that Konys soldiers and other armed groups walk hundreds of miles from Sudan into this endless grass curtain to kill elephants. Kafia Kingi is so widely recognized as a Kony hideout that in April 2013 a coalition of groups, including Invisible Children, the Enough Project, and the Resolve, issued a report called Hidden in Plain Sight: Sudans Harboring of the LRA in the Kafia Kingi Enclave, 2009-2013. LRA defectors I spoke with consistently placed the warlord in the Kafia Kingi area too. That members of the Sudanese military trade arms for ivory with the LRA raises questions about the highest levels of Sudans government. It was still too dangerous, Turkalo decided, so she made her escape by boat a second time. That's just something to think about and consider really because it's absolutely RIDICULOUS that any animal should have to go through that. It is believed they do this either to cool themselves off or as a reaction to the annoyance of parasites of the skin. I spend a night in police custody, where Im given a desk to sleep on. This story launches the National Geographic Societys Special Investigations Unit, which will report on wildlife crimes. We protect the park to give the people something of value. He fights for elephants because he knows that without the animals presence, no one will support Garamba, and the parkwhich he calls Africas heartwill be lost. At that time, about 18% of females there were born without tusks. The Ugandan military finally attacked Konys Garamba camps in late 2008. When the American Museum of Natural History wanted to update the hall of North American mammals, taxidermist George Dante got the call. CORNISH: That's Fanie Pelletier, a wildlife biologist in Canada who wasn't involved in the work. It was to become her home, and her life's work. For his Judas pig project he built GPS satellite collars to enable pest control authorities in New Zealand to send feral pigs into the bush and locate their invasive piggy friends. According to CITES Secretary-General John Scanlon, Sudan does not appear on these lists because CITES sets priorities based mainly on ivory seizures, and there have been few ivory seizures linked to Sudan in recent years. But ammunition is in perilously short supplynot even enough for basic trainingand the rangers largest weapon, a belt-fed machine gun, tends to jam every third round or so. It was thanks largely to efforts by the group Invisible Children and its video Kony 2012 that Kony became a household name in the West. Once the war and poaching ended, elephants with tusks were more likely to survive because they could use their tusks to find water and food. A few days later the tusks proceed to Songo, the Sudanese market town where Onen said Konys men trade ivory. Those looking at the tusks think Im an ivory trafficker. They set up camp and in a four-month rampage killed up to 650 elephants. 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. Seleka and its rival, anti-Balaka, have set fire to people, thrown them off bridges, and murdered people wantonly, turning CAR into a lawless statethe kind of place where Konys group and other terrorist organizations thrive. Some 30,000 African elephants die each year at the hands of poachers to satisfy the global demand for ivory. But in central Africa, as I learned firsthand, something more sinister is driving the killing: Militias and terrorist groups funded in part by ivory are poaching elephants, often outside their home countries, and even hiding inside national parks. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a treaty organization that governs international trade in ivoryand its continuing banhas identified eight countries of primary concern when it comes to international ivory trafficking: China, Kenya, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Uganda, Tanzania, and Vietnam. 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. There were armed combatants roaming the countryside. It's run by a band of men who, if not exactly soldiers-of-fortune, certainly are trained warriors. 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