With the war over, the evolutionary pressure from poaching has eased. Tusks have gone back to being useful tools
Shane Campbell-Staton, a biologist at Princeton University, studies how animals adapt to human creations like cities and pollution. His interest was piqued by a film about the tuskless female elephants of Gorongosa National Park, in Mozambique. Their lack of tusks was thought to be a consequence of another human creation—the Mozambican civil war, which lasted from 1977 to 1992 and was partly paid for by the killing of elephants for their ivory.
It was a plausible theory, says Dr Campbell-Staton, but no one had actually tested it. Through a mix of old video footage and surveys, he and his colleagues concluded that around 18% of the female elephants in Gorongosa lacked tusks before the war. Three decades later, after it was over, that number had risen to 50%. Computer simulations suggested that the likelihood of such a rapid change happening by chance, even in a diminished population, was tiny.
Besides confirming the change, the researchers managed to unravel its genetic roots. Tusklessness is caused by a mutation in a gene on the elephantinechromosome. Unfortunately for males, the mutation is a package deal, coming with changes to nearby genes that interfere with embryonic development. Males who inherit the mutant gene die before birth.
Finding one now seems unlikely. , helping their owners strip bark from trees and dig for water. In recent years the prevalence of tuskless females has fallen, to around 33%. But the speed of the change is a reminder that wars can alter evolutionary history as well as the human sort.
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