'We are losing as many as 50,000 African elephants per year.'
February 14, 2022, 7:46 PMWASHINGTON - DNA testing on seized ivory shipments that reveals family ties among African elephants killed for their tusks is helping to identify poaching areas and trafficking networks at the center of an illegal trade that continues to devastate the population of Earth's largest land animal.
Most ivory is exported in large consignments - up to 10 tons each - shipped as marine cargo and concealed among legal exports crossing oceans on container ships. The DNA testing matched two tusks from the same elephant or, more often, tusks from close relatives found in separate containers for shipment in the same port.
The new research expanded the testing's scope to also identify tusks of elephants that were closely related, including parents, offspring, full siblings and half siblings. Up to 2016, tusks were coming from elephants primarily from northern Mozambique north through Tanzania up to southern Kenya, Wasser said. Around 2016, there was a significant increase in tusks poached from a region twice the size of Britain called the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area that includes northern Botswana, northeastern Namibia, southern Zambia and southeastern Angola, Wasser said.
Special Agent John Brown, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security criminal investigator and study co-author, said DNA forensic analysis has provided a road map for multinational collaborative investigations.
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