VIDEO: J.J. Kelley, NG Studios. In the United States, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama supported efforts either to arrest or kill him. On our patrol we dont encounter any poachers or rebel groups. Researchers in Mozambique found a . Suddenly they move steadily north, about 12 miles a day along the border with South Sudan, avoiding all roads. 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. 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. EVERY SINGLE animal on this planet is special and this doesn't happen to monkeys or crocodiles or birds does it? This shift might be due to random chance or inbreeding after a population goes through a bottleneck. A sixth, a young lookout, ran down the hill, disappeared, and is presumed dead. During the summer Konys soldiers had killed 25 elephants in Garamba, and they were on their way back to Kony carrying the ivory. Female elephants do use their tusks, but female elephants in Mozambique are doing just fine without them, according to Long. They included South Sudanese armed forces (SPLA) and Sudanese military, as well as defectors from those militaries and an assortment of Sudan-based rebels. As she sips her tea in the Providence coffee shop, Turkalo is the picture of calm. Onen had been part of an LRA poaching operation in Garamba consisting of 41 fighters, including Konys son Salim. Instead of signing a peace agreement, Kony had his peace negotiator executed. 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. Fifty percent of her sons will be tusked, but that other 50% would die. Rangers practice their riding skills at Zakouma National Park, in Chad. The dogs are Belgian Malinois shepherds, famed for their use in military operations, especially in tough conditions like the dense central African bush. A welcome sight returns to Zakouma: babies. Park rangers are often the only forces going up against the killers. ", "We got into a boat; we went downriver," Turkalo says. CORNISH: The upshot, which they published this week in the journal Science, is that females without tusks are pretty likely to have tuskless babies, which is why the trait was becoming so prevalent. 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. only . The New York Times Archives. She and other scientists also recorded their calls. National Geographic commissioned the creation of artificial tusks with hidden GPS trackers that were planted in the smuggling supplychain. She had gone to Africa to do aid work, but was drawn to the intricate lives of these elephants. So I said to myself, 'I better go into a very passive mode.' Such a biased sex ratio would be expected with a recessive gene that kills males when they inherit it. As we talk over my design needs, Dantes brown eyes sparkle like a boys on Christmas morning. To gain more troops it recruited civilians into its armyincluding child soldersafter mass abductions. 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. From the moment of his capture, Onen says, he was a complainer. TEXT EDITOR: Oliver Payne. 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. The Central African Republic (CAR). Jensen, who was executive producer of the series, and Alex Chadwick, chief correspondent, insisted on the highest quality sound recording to complement its reporting. Three more are classified as of importance to watch: Angola, Cambodia, and Laos. 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. 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. This story launches the National Geographic Societys Special Investigations Unit, which will report on wildlife crimes. This comment was removed because it broke the rules. By 1913, the African elephant population had dropped to an estimated 10 million. We meet in a busy coffee shop full of students from nearby Brown University. Among the recent casualties was a group of rare forest elephants in the Central African Republic. 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. 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. And I was like, ooh, what's this? He points a finger at me, and yells, You are a liar, bwana! (Bwana is Swahili for sir.). But a new study suggests there is a serious reason for why lots of tuskless elephants can now be found in the country of Mozambique in Africa - poaching. Can fake tusks with hidden GPS trackers thwartthem? Having worked extensively throughout central Africa, Froment transferred to Garamba in early 2014 after rangers discovered dozens of elephant carcasses in the park. It was still too dangerous, Turkalo decided, so she made her escape by boat a second time. 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. 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. "I heard they were on their way. His account was corroborated by Caesar Achellam, a former intelligence chief for Kony who is now in the Ugandan governments custody. It's called the Dzanga bai a clearing the size of several football fields that's rich in the mineralized mud that the elephants depend on. Nov. 6, 1954. Where did the tusks end up? CORNISH: Consequences that are still continuing nearly 30 years after the war. RENAMO also had imposed a system it called Gamdira whereby villagers were required to produce food, transport goods and ammunition, and village women were forced to be sex slaves. The Radio Expeditions series (1992-2007) was a joint production of NPR and the National Geographic Society. Soldiers killed elephants to acquire ivory which was later sold to finance arms and ammunition. If he can do this, Ill ask him to make several more tusks. As Somalia is to piracy, Sudan has become to elephant poaching. 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. 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Was it genetically inherited at all? The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. No, I want ivory for ammunition to keep fighting, was Konys reply, according to Onen, who was listening to transmissions. But after Otti left Garamba to participate in the peace talks, Kony began killing elephants for ivory. 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. They all report to him, they all obey him. 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. An estimated 25,000 elephants are killed every year in Africa for their tusks, double the number killed in 2007. Instead of being made a soldier, he was designated a signalera radioman privy to Konys secret communications. Erik Stokstad is a reporter at Science, covering environmental issues. It was the rainy season, and the rangers, like the elephants they were guarding, had left the park for higher ground. It was to become her home, and her life's work. Its easier to live with things, she says. Theyre looting communities, enslaving people, and killing park rangers who get in their way. 4. Officials are pointing fingers and arguing. 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. Your tax-deductible contribution plays a critical role in sustaining this effort. Geli Oh, 16, spent longer with Konys army than her two friendstwo and a half terrible years. The story typically would have ended with the wanton killing of these park rangers protecting elephants. When theyre abducted, theyre very young, and theyre forced to do horrible things. But in the generation born after the war, the rate was 33%, according to decades of observations by the nonprofit group ElephantVoices. They also had twice as many daughters as sons. The cook, Djimet Said (opposite), was shot but survived, walking 11 miles to the nearest village for help. But that's not the end of the story. The teams cook, also wounded, struggled 11 miles to get help. Katy Payne/The Elephant Listening Project Without the stress of poaching, the elephants started breeding again, and more than 40 calves have been born. But it failed to rout Kony or his leadership. Schreger lines, he says. By 1913, the African elephant population had dropped to an estimated 10 million. In Zimbabwe, a recent survey shows massive losses in some parks. 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. Five of the six men in Zakoumas Hippotrague patrol unit were killed by elephant poachers outside the park; the sixth is presumed dead. The park has four mounted ranger teams because horses are the only way to effectively patrol during the wet season, when the elephants head to drier land outside the park. In 2002, NPR host and correspondent Alex Chadwick and sound engineer Bill McQuay went to central Africa to see and gather sound from the rare forest elephants of the Dzanga bai. "But I'm certain I knew a few of the elephants they killed," she says including some that the NPR team had recorded. In Songo the tusks are held for three days in what looks like a clearing outside town. A female forest elephant charges, in Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve in the Central African Republic. Or will they go nowhere, discovered before theyre moved and turned in by an honest person? 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. In humans, a mutated version of AMELX is linked to male death before birth; in females, that version stunts the growth of the upper incisors, the same teeth that become tusks in elephants. 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. The White Elephant symbolizes distinctive things for both the man and Jig. After more than an hour of animated debate, they phone the airports wildlife expert. They found that the tuskless trait was genetic, found in the X chromosome, and it was deadly in males. These soldiers are tasked with helping rangers fight poachers and armed groups like theLRA. 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. 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. "They recognize each other's voices," she told us in 2002, "just like women recognize their babies' cries. After visiting Garamba, I arrange with a confidential source to put my tusks into the black market near Mboki, a small village in CAR midway between Garamba and Sudan that has been the target of attacks by Konys army and where some people who have escaped from Kony have found safety. I unzip my suitcase to expose two fake tusks and hand him letters from the U.S. I didn't go looking for this. After Lucienne Lanziwas husband died in an LRA attack on Garamba, she got a modest stipend. ", Now, a year later, Andrea is stoic about the loss. 'Everybody out, everybody out.' One possibility is that surges of intense hunting have occurred on and off in Gorongosa over millennia, letting the genes occasionally provide a benefit. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Geographic certifying that theyre artificial. "So we heard this 'rat-a-tat-tat.' SHANE CAMPBELL-STATON: The Howard Hughes Medical Institute - they had this video that was called "The Tuskless Elephants Of Gorongosa." This limited the trade of some ivory, but trade still continued across the world. It was used to make combs, pool balls, knick-knacks, and even piano keys. The cook, Djimet Said (below), was shot but survived, walking 11 miles to the nearest village for help. Andrea Turkalo/The Elephant Listening Project, Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. "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. Onen is short and looks even smaller wearing a camouflage-patterned Ugandan army uniform thats too long for him in the sleeves. When north and south Sudan signed a peace agreement in 2005, Kony lost his Sudanese host. Around us stroll Ugandan army soldiers, who make up the entire African Union contingent based in Obo and are committed to finding and killing Kony. Science and AAAS are working tirelessly to provide credible, evidence-based information on the latest scientific research and policy, with extensive free coverage of the pandemic. Do not lose even one tusk, he instructed the group, according to Onen, who said the plan was to carry the ivory to a rendezvous in CAR and then on to a market town in Darfur called Songo, not far from the Sudan Armed Forces garrison in Dafaq. "There's such a blizzard of depressing news about biodiversity and humans in the environment and I think it's important to emphasise that there are some bright spots in that picture. According to data stored in a GPS unit taken off the body of LRA commander Vincent Binany Okumu, who was killed in a 2013 firefight with African Union forces on his return from poaching in Garamba, this village is on the path of ivory headed to Konys base inDarfur. Between April 25 and June 17, poachers killed two Garamba rangers and two army . Civil war drove these elephants to lose their tusksthrough evolution. Learn more about the Explorer series. Arent you interested in peace talks?. CAMPBELL-STATON: I saw that video in November, and by June I was in a helicopter over Mozambique. "The people on the shore, they started discharging their automatic weapons in the air," she remembers. A crowd gathers. 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