The UN estimated that the massacre displaced more than a hundred thousand Congolese and Sudanese. As far as Onen knew, the poaching squad he abandoned was still making its way north from Garamba through CAR to Sudan. In Tanzania and Mozambique, elephants . Michael K. Nichols/National Geographic/Getty Images. Villagers sometimes taunt returned children with the same expression used for Konys men: LRA Tongo Tongo. LRA Cut Cuta reference, Sugule explains, to the militants vicious use ofmachetes. We meet over Skype. We ask if she recognized any of the elephants in the photos taken of their carcasses after the poachers fled. Copyright 2021 NPR. Im not an animal lover, he snaps. Researchers are still trying to pinpoint all the genetics that underpin . After Sudanese poachers killed his ranger father, Adoum refused diya, a traditional community payment. This is a photocopy of the diary of the LRAs Lt. Col. Vincent Binany Okumu, who, defectors say, was in charge of ivory hunting in Garamba National Park. By 1979, there were only 1.3 million elephants left. 5. Do we really need to sell ivory tusks in the world just to make money? 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). Before the civil war, about 18.5% of females were naturally tuskless, but that figure has risen to 33% among elephants born since the early 1990s. In ten years hes never made a mistake, he says: The tusks are real. Back in 1969 Gorongosa National Park was home to over 2200 elephants, but now there is just over 700 in the park. First, Campbell-Staton wanted to make sure the proportion of tuskless elephants in Mozambique had indeed changed. I just can't understand why anyone would want to take away any of the amazing qualities and features of an elephant. MCCAMMON: But the number of tuskless elephants was multiplying in Mozambique during and after the country's decades-long civil war, which ended in 1992. 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. There were armed combatants roaming the countryside. "I could hear the call and say, 'Yeah, that's a juvenile being pushed out of a hole by its mother; it's protesting.' "They were terrified. She had gone to Africa to do aid work, but was drawn to the intricate lives of these elephants. 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. It was just after 4 a.m. on Heban hill, in Chad, 80 miles from the Sudanese border and 60 miles northeast of Zakouma National Park, home to the countrys largest remaining elephant herd, 450 animals. The NPR team had spent hours on that platform with Andrea, seeing these huge animals in a way few people in the world have a chance to do, and with someone who could "translate" what they were doing. Between April 25 and June 17, poachers killed two Garamba rangers and two army officers assisting with patrols. Show your work. World Elephant Day: Ten reasons we love elephants, Elephants counted from space for conservation project. But time is stalking our team: Months later, on April 25, 2015, while on patrol, the ranger who led me into Garamba, Agoyo Mbikoyo, was shot and killed by a gang of poachers. By Bryan ChristyPhotographs by Brent StirtonPublished August 12, 2015. Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. "So we heard this 'rat-a-tat-tat.' "I can never get too emotionally attached to things there," she says of central Africa, "because otherwise you set yourself up for a lot of disappointment. Those looking at the tusks think Im an ivory trafficker. I want Dante to design an artificial elephant tusk that has the look and feel of confiscated tusks loaned to me by the U.S. Inside the fake tusk, I want him to embed a custom-made GPS and satellite-based tracking system. At the sound of a twig cracking or the detection of an unexpected scent on the wind, a ranger in front of me, Agoyo Mbikoyo, signals caution, and I drop with the team into a collective crouch and wait silently. "And they were yelling at us," she says. " Achellam told me that Konys men planned for the future. A sixth, a young lookout, ran down the hill, disappeared, and is presumed dead. 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. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Andrea Turkalo/The Elephant Listening Project, Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. The LRA sells to the Sudan Armed Forces, Onen said. National Geographic television producer J.J.Kelley takes the floor in the waiting area. Father Ernest Sugule, who ministers to the village, tells me that many children in his diocese have seen family members killed by the Lords Resistance Army, or LRA, the Ugandan rebel group led by Joseph Kony, one of Africas most wanted terrorists. He went first to Sudan, initiating a pattern of border-hopping that continues to make him difficult to track. Despite their lack of tusks, it's often the females who can be seen defending the herd. "We gave them a little money and said the Seleka were coming," says Turkalo. My tusks will have to act like ivory. They have flashbacks. Embattled park rangers are often the only defense for wildlife andvillagers. The biggest is why a dominant gene associated with deadly effects for males would persist in the population during periods without poaching. Kony even invited foreign press into his camp for interviews. Shane Campbell-Staton, an evolutionary biologist now at Princeton University, was curious about the elephants of Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, where tuskless elephantswhich are all femaleare unusually common. Ongwen also said that Kony intends to form a squad to establish contact with Boko Haram, the Nigerian terrorist group responsible for widespread killings and the kidnappings of hundreds of Nigerian women and schoolgirls. Tusk inheritance patterns in the ElephantVoices database backed up that assumption. ", 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. Other roads also lead to Sudan. PELLETIER: The reason why that's important is because if you stop the killing right now, you know, the time it would take for the population to, you know, restore that traits would be much longer. By the time you read this, my tusks might have gone to Khartoum. You know, yet those actions - right? Im a problem solver., I laugh. 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. FANIE PELLETIER: It's one of the most detailed example of how human activity can influence the genes of a population. 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. As she sips her tea in the Providence coffee shop, Turkalo is the picture of calm. Or you hear a rumble, and you know it's probably an adult female, rumbling for a family either saying, 'I'm here,' or 'Let's go.' The rangers also recovered a stamped Sudanese army leave slip granting three soldiers permission to travel from Darfur to a town near the Chadian border. MCCAMMON: Around 90% of the elephants there were killed, but many female elephants without tusks survived and thrived. Using Kermeens technology, he could adjust how many times a day they tried to communicate with a satellite via the Internet. One of them knew one of the women in the boat. 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. 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. Ivory poachers are killing some 22,000 African elephants a year. As of this writing, my artificial tusks sent out their last communication from a Sudanese town called Ed Daein, 500 miles southwest of Khartoum. In Mozambique, past hunting pressure led to an increase of . Albert Roca, a geneticist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, calls the shift striking in its speedand because it is driven by people. Today, poaching has stopped in Gorongosa, and the elephant population is recovering. It consists of a battery capable of lasting more than a year, a GPS receiver, an Iridium satellite transceiver, and a temperature sensor. My artificial tusks sit motionless for several weeks, a pair of tear-shaped blue dots on my computer screen, which displays a digital map of the eastern corner of CAR. Katy Payne/The Elephant Listening Project Konys response was immediate and savage. Wittemyer wonders whether a similar phenomenon happened long ago in Asia, because both male and female fossil elephants there have tusks, but among living Asian elephants, only males have tusks. This story launches the National Geographic Societys Special Investigations Unit, which will report on wildlife crimes. After six hours on the dark river, they got to safety, to a campsite in the Congo. 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. They shift a few miles. A crowd gathers. 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. Although the adaptation comes with a pricean associated genetic mutation kills male elephants before theyre bornthe emerging trait may have helped save the population. By 1913, the African elephant population had dropped to an estimated 10 million. By Jake Buehler. All rights reserved. In June the Tanzanian government announced that the country has lost 60 percent of its elephants in the past five years, down from 110,000 to fewer than 44,000. The men of the Hippotrague unit assumed that after the previous teams raid, the poachers had all fled home. In the morning, after officials from Tanzanias Wildlife Division and the U.S. Embassy arrive, Im released. Ongwen said Konys plan is to obtain as much ivory as possible for his future survival should he not be able to overthrow the government of Uganda.. Please make a tax-deductible gift today. It is assumed that the girls were raped, so its difficult for them to find husbands. A few days later the tusks proceed to Songo, the Sudanese market town where Onen said Konys men trade ivory. COPY EDITOR: Cindy Leitner, Hear Brent Stirton tell their stories in an audioslideshow, Hear Bryan Christy discuss the investigation on. See the article in its original context from. The poaching issue is a governance issue, Froment says. Kony was adamant in his radio transmissions. 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. 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.. The Elephant Listening Project What can be done to help save the elephants? You did exactly what you were supposed to do, I said, shaking their hands. 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. 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