Gathering speed, they continue north before abruptly turning east, in the direction of Khartoum. The recent death toll of elephants in Garamba has been staggering, even by central African standards. We meet in a busy coffee shop full of students from nearby Brown University. So did the African Union military forces, whose CAR-based men in Obo are tasked with finding Kony. Konys response was immediate and savage. By Bryan ChristyPhotographs by Brent StirtonPublished August 12, 2015. The result: Some 30,000 African elephants are slaughtered every year, more than 100,000 between 2010 and 2012, and the pace of killing is not slowing. This story launches the National Geographic Societys Special Investigations Unit, which will report on wildlife crimes. The teams cook, also wounded, struggled 11 miles to get help. One possibility is that surges of intense hunting have occurred on and off in Gorongosa over millennia, letting the genes occasionally provide a benefit. So we Bill McQuay and Chris Joyce, who've worked together on stories from the mountains of China to the copper mines of Michigan recently decided to go see Turkalo and find out what happened. In 2009 Bashir became the worlds first sitting head of state indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity. These jumbo foragers are masterful engineers of their surroundings. Andrea Turkalo sketched the ears and other details of the elephants she studied to help identify them. Six antipoaching rangers and their cook, the entirety of the Hippotrague (French for roan antelope) unit, were awake, dressed in camouflage uniforms, and preparing for morning prayersdevoted even in the darkness. But after Otti left Garamba to participate in the peace talks, Kony began killing elephants for ivory. Fish and Wildlife Service. hide caption. Zakoumas Mamba Team 1 antipoaching unit includes driver Issa Adoum (brown shirt). A sixth, a young lookout, ran down the hill, disappeared, and is presumed dead. 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. The Central African Republic (CAR). 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. They found that the tuskless trait was genetic, found in the X chromosome, and it was deadly in males. Those looking at the tusks think Im an ivory trafficker. Six years later, on October 25, 2014, Onen tells me, his poaching mission to Garamba was scheduled to deliver its ivory to Kony in Sudan. This pushed the species to the brink of extinction. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Some elephant populations seem to be missing their tusks. She well remembers the day when the war came to the bai. Outnumbered and ill equipped, theyre manning the front line in a violent battle that affects us all. According to Col. Mike Kabango, of the African Union forces, the image shows a large tent and two smaller ones; to Ryan Stage, a remote-sensing specialist in Colorado, it shows a large truck and two small tents. MCCAMMON: Campbell-Staton and his team worked with local researchers who had tracked elephants for decades. Its easier to live with things, she says. Father Sugule introduces me to three young girls, recent LRA kidnapping victims, who are sitting on a wooden bench in his church. The UN estimated that the massacre displaced more than a hundred thousand Congolese and Sudanese. Instead of signing a peace agreement, Kony had his peace negotiator executed. RESEARCH: Heidi Schultz, Brad Scriber. By Jake Buehler. You can hear the original field recordings and interviews from Radio Expedition's 2002 elephant story, and see photos and night-vision video from the elephant bai, on the archive's website. It was supposed to be a short posting, but he saw too much death to leave. Being small, he balked at having to carry the heavy bundles that Konys militants ferry from camp to camp in their patrols across central Africa, and for his whining, he was beaten with a machete. Issa, who is Chadian, said he joined the team of three Sudanese men and that together they rode more than two weeks to get to Heban, where they killed nine elephants in four days. The poachers opened fire, killing five rangers. I will use his tusks to hunt the people who kill elephants and to learn what roads their ivory plunder follows, which ports it leaves, what ships it travels on, what cities and countries it transits, and where it ends up. Beginning on Christmas Eve, his soldiers spread out in small teams and murdered civilians. Can fake tusks with hidden GPS trackers thwartthem? Mozambiques civil war from 1977 to 1992 had a grim outcome for elephants: During that time, some 90% were killed for the ivory in their tusks, which were sold to finance the war. To look for genes that might be involved, the team took blood from 18 female elephants in the park and sequenced their genomes. When Ele, a female elephant, died, other elephants approached one-by-one and touched their trunks to the body. Ugandan soldiers with the African Unions Regional Task Force hunt for LRA leader Joseph Kony in the Central African Republic (CAR), pulling themselves along ropes to cross rivers. It was the rainy season, and the rangers, like the elephants they were guarding, had left the park for higher ground. 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. These soldiers are tasked with helping rangers fight poachers and armed groups like theLRA. Read about our approach to external linking. Quintin Kermeen, 51, based in Concord, California, has the credentials, and the personality, Im looking for. Their path is consistent with the route Konys defectors tell me ivory takes on the way to the warlords Kafia Kingi base. This limited the trade of some ivory, but trade still continued across the world. The elephants coat themselves in red clay. We ask if she recognized any of the elephants in the photos taken of their carcasses after the poachers fled. 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. The series was one of NPR's earliest adopters of digital technology and led the network in surround-sound production. 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. c. percentage of elephants killed for . On our patrol we dont encounter any poachers or rebel groups. Professor Pringle said it was possible to reverse this trait over time as long as work to recover elephant populations from the brink of extinction continues. After more than an hour of animated debate, they phone the airports wildlife expert. From the moment of his capture, Onen says, he was a complainer. The Rhodesian armed forces lacked the manpower to effectively protect its 1,300-kilometre (800 mi) border with Mozambique against entering ZANLA insurgents. The relationship is close: SAF warns Kony if theres trouble, Onen says. 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. They shift a few miles. Sugule is the founder of a group that provides assistance to victims of Konys army. The air strike, dubbed Operation Lightning Thunder, included support from the DRC, southern Sudan, and the U.S. 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. Now it was rare to see 250 in aherd. Otti was furious, Onen says. Traits that are beneficial in one environment may not be beneficial in another. It was several weeks after that, that she heard that poachers taking advantage of the chaos in the country had invaded the bai. A pilot study published this year showed that the presence of a beehive fence reduced the odds of an elephant crossing the river by 95%. PRODUCER: Janey Adams. FANIE PELLETIER: It's one of the most detailed example of how human activity can influence the genes of a population. To her relief, the men turned out to be local. Locals, including poor villagers and unpaid park rangers, are killing elephants for casha risk theyre willing to take because even if theyre caught, the penalties are often negligible. 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. Where did the tusks end up? Eventually, more than four tons was found, Africas largest seizure since the global ivory trade ban took effect in 1990. 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. All rights reserved. Seven surgeries later shes forgiven them. In 2013, Khamis Kagasheki, then Tanzanias minister of natural resources and tourism, declared that the illegal ivory trade involves rich people and politicians who have formed a very sophisticated network, and he accused four members of Tanzanias Parliament of being involved init. In the criminal world, ivory operates as currency, so in a way Im asking Dante to print counterfeit money I canfollow. During the Mozambican Civil War from 1977 to 1992, humans killed so many elephants for their lucrative ivory that the animals seem to have evolved in the space of a generation. Turkalo had lived through civil strife before, but this time, she tells us, it was much worse. Female elephants do use their tusks, but female elephants in Mozambique are doing just fine without them, according to Long. Back in 1969 Gorongosa National Park was home to over 2200 elephants, but now there is just over 700 in the park. Once the war and poaching ended,elephants with tusks were more likely to survive because they could use their tusks to find . Erik Stokstad is a reporter at Science, covering environmental issues. Froment uses the word war to describe the fight Garambas 150 rangers are in with poachers. Researchers took blood samples from elephants in order to sequence their genomes. With an average of 16 years in the bush with the LRA, the men bring a wealth of experience to the hunt for Kony and his fighters. On January 2, 2009, the horror bled into Garambas headquarters, at Nagero, where Kony soldiers burned the park rangers main building, destroyed equipment, and killed at least eight rangers and staff members. (Special thanks to the National Public Radio - National Geographic Society Radio Expeditions Sound Collection at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, for sharing the audio.). Garamba is managed through a partnership between the DRCs wildlife department and African Parks, a group based in Johannesburg, South Africa. No one has. "This time they covered most of country," she says, "pillage, rape and kill. "You know, a lot of the NGOs, we just cut and run," she tells us matter-of-factly. In . If true, Soumaine Issa will find poachers working with Seleka. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Thanks to stepped-up enforcement, the park hasnt lost an elephant to poachers since 2012. This behavior is associated with mourning, field researchers say. Then they head south six miles, back into Kafia Kingi. A crowd gathers. In 1978, the elephant was listed as threatened under the United States' Endangered Species Act. This comment was removed because it broke the rules. 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. By 1913, the African elephant population had dropped to an estimated 10 million. Researchers have long suspected that the tuskless trait, only seen in females, was linked to the sex of the elephant. Schreger lines, he says. Onen had been part of an LRA poaching operation in Garamba consisting of 41 fighters, including Konys son Salim. Fifty percent will be tuskless. Instead of being made a soldier, he was designated a signalera radioman privy to Konys secret communications. They shot 26 elephants and cut out their tusks. In the morning, after officials from Tanzanias Wildlife Division and the U.S. Embassy arrive, Im released. The family of Idriss Adoum (second from left) tracked one suspect to Sudan. Editor's Note: Viewers may find the next image from the 2013 elephant slaughter disturbing. Those elephants were featured in an NPR program, Radio Expeditions, in 2002, when former NPR host and correspondent Alex Chadwick and sound engineer Bill McQuay went to central Africa to record them. PHOTO EDITOR: Kathy Moran. "They were terrified. Eight more are considered of secondary concern: Cameroon, Congo, the DRC, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Mozambique, and Nigeria. Konys men jump back and forth across borders, hiding in countries where governance is weak. The culprits are believed to have been South Sudanese, according to African Parks. Despite Sudans role as a safe haven for groups known to traffic ivory, such as the LRA, janjaweed, and other poaching gangs, the country has drawn limited official attention as a poaching state. Between April 25 and June 17, poachers killed two Garamba rangers and two army . DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT: Kevin DiCesare, Joel Fiser, Jaime Hritsik, Brian Jacobs. 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). 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. 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. It's nothing extraordinary for humans. November 6, 1954, Page 3 Buy Reprints. 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. 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 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. All of central Africa is a hand grenade, its pin pulled by a history of resource exploitation from abroad, dictatorships, and poverty. It was still too dangerous, Turkalo decided, so she made her escape by boat a second time. A white elephant is a valuable item that has a rate that perhaps surpasses its usefulness. It was just impossible to stay. He asks for water for me and is led out of the building. Without the stress of poaching, the elephants started breeding again, and more than 40 calves have been born. 4. Although the adaptation comes with a pricean associated genetic mutation kills male elephants before theyre bornthe emerging trait may have helped save the population. It's run by a band of men who, if not exactly soldiers-of-fortune, certainly are trained warriors. Zakouma breathes its elephants. Show your work. when will hunters get the message we need other species alive on our planet for our own species to survive . I'm outraged as to how some people have the audacity to kill these inconncent , sentient creatures who , like most animals help keep the food chain stable. As Somalia is to piracy, Sudan has become to elephant poaching. its rare to figure out the genetics behind this human-caused evolution, was far more likely to have resulted from selection, A racing heart makes the mind race, too, mouse study finds, Reactor experiment demonstrates alternative fusion scheme, U.K. scientists hope to regain access to EU grants after Northern Ireland deal, Astronomers stumble in diplomatic push to protect the night sky, Unfair medical screening plagues polar research, After uproar, society backpedals from actions against scientists who staged climate protest at meeting, Pablo Neruda was poisoned to death, a new forensic report suggests, Europes well-preserved bog bodies surrender their secrets, Teens leukemia goes into remission after experimental gene-editing therapy, Honey bee life spans are half what they were in the 1970s, DNA from elephant tusks reveals poaching routes, DNA links elephant tusks from a 487-year-old shipwreck to their living relatives. They had nowhere to run." for their meat. CAMPBELL-STATON: You know, people during the Mozambican Civil War were not thinking about the evolution of elephants, I imagine, in the slightest. During the civil war between 1977 to 1992, poachers sold the ivory to finance the conflict, including buying arms and ammunition. Now, scientists say that drove some elephants to evolve tusklessness. 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. In Songo the tusks are held for three days in what looks like a clearing outside town. If he can do this, Ill ask him to make several more tusks. 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. Click the arrow below to hear the amazing audio tale they brought home. Turkalo is now part of an extraordinary operation to protect the surviving forest elephants. When ivory poachers target elephants, the hunters can affect more than just animal numbers. National Geographic commissioned the creation of artificial tusks with hidden GPS trackers that were planted in the smuggling supplychain. 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. 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. First, Campbell-Staton wanted to make sure the proportion of tuskless elephants in Mozambique had indeed changed. 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. Arent you interested in peace talks?. A study in Gorongosa revealed that while male elephants did have tusks but almost 50% of female elephants above the age of 20 did not. All creatures should live in harmony! Despite their lack of tusks, it's often the females who can be seen defending the herd. Im not an animal lover, he snaps. The relatives of murdered Zakouma ranger Idriss Adoum tracked one of the alleged Heban hill poachers to Sudan and arranged to have him brought back to Chad to stand trial. 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. "I don't know which ones they killed," she replies. Since the 2008-09 attack by Konys soldiers, rangers have finished building a new headquarters and acquired two airplanes and a helicopter. Follow theirroute. Like much of the world, George Dante knows that the African elephant is under siege. Some 30,000 African elephants die each year at the hands of poachers to satisfy the global demand for ivory. In presenting that case, ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo underscored Bashirs control of the groups said to be behind Sudans ivory trafficking: He used the army, he enrolled the Militia/Janjaweed. Garamba is a crucible within a crucible, a park under siege in a country often in civil war in a region that has nearly forgotten peace. Since the 1980s, and beginning in Uganda, Konys minions are alleged to have killed tens of thousands of people, slicing the lips, ears, and breasts off women, raping children and women, chopping off the feet of those caught riding bicycles, and kidnapping young boys to create an army of child soldiers who themselves grow into killers. After Zakoumas rangers destroyed their camp and confiscated their equipment, the poachers were unable to return to Sudan, so three weeks later they went back to Heban hill and attacked the Hippotrague unit. During the rains the park is more lake than land, and elephants split into two groups to escape the floods. "But I'm certain I knew a few of the elephants they killed," she says including some that the NPR team had recorded. Embattled park rangers are often the only defense for wildlife andvillagers. See the article in its original context from. ", 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. Katy Payne/The Elephant Listening Project, Former Commando Turns Conservationist To Save Elephants Of Dzanga Bai. Rangers practice their riding skills at Zakouma National Park, in Chad. So why elephants? They set up camp and in a four-month rampage killed up to 650 elephants. 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. At the same time, the apartheid government and the Smith regime lost Portugal as an ally and with it the tens of thousands of soldiers that had been deployed in the Portuguese colonial wars. The dogs are Belgian Malinois shepherds, famed for their use in military operations, especially in tough conditions like the dense central African bush. SHANE CAMPBELL-STATON: The Howard Hughes Medical Institute - they had this video that was called "The Tuskless Elephants Of Gorongosa." Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. Dzanga Baialso known as the village of elephantsis a mineral-rich mudhole where the animalscongregate. Ivory poachers are killing some 22,000 African elephants a year. From March 2014 to March 2015, Garambas rangers recorded 31 contacts with armed poachers, more than half of whom were with groups traveling south from the direction of South Sudan and Sudan. Such genes ought to disappear, Roca says, because females that lack them would have more offspring. During the summer Konys soldiers had killed 25 elephants in Garamba, and they were on their way back to Kony carrying the ivory. "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. Kermeen started in the radio-tracking business when he was 15 and has since built electronic trackers and collars for wildlife from Andean bears to California condors to Tasmanian devils. Rogue militias and army soldiers from the DRC, Sudan, and South Sudan are slaughtering elephants in the park. Five of the six men in Zakoumas Hippotrague patrol unit were killed by elephant poachers outside the park; the sixth is presumed dead. 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. Front line in a violent battle that affects us all through civil strife before, but this time they most. Of his capture, Onen says, because females that lack them would have more offspring fine without,. Have finished building a new headquarters and acquired two airplanes and a helicopter left the park men in are. `` I do n't know which ones they killed, '' she replies Investigations! Without the stress of poaching, the elephants they were on their way back Kony... 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