{"id":12262,"date":"2022-03-21T11:52:02","date_gmt":"2022-03-21T11:52:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/mauritius\/all-news\/scientists-use-ivory-tusk-dna-data-to-locate-poaching-networks"},"modified":"2022-03-22T08:41:29","modified_gmt":"2022-03-22T08:41:29","slug":"scientists-use-ivory-tusk-dna-data-to-locate-poaching-networks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/mauritius\/all-news\/scientists-use-ivory-tusk-dna-data-to-locate-poaching-networks","title":{"rendered":"Scientists use ivory tusk DNA data to locate poaching networks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Africa-Press – Mauritius. <\/strong><\/span>In Ivory Coast a group of conservationists and veterinarians are moving this increasingly endangered forest elephant to an area where the animal is less likely to be targetted by poachers.<\/p>\n

Scientists have been using DNA testing to track how ivory traffickers are operating. As few as three major criminal groups are responsible for smuggling the vast majority of elephant ivory tusks out of Africa, according to a new study.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve develop a combined genetic and statistical method to determine the origin of poached ivory and they are collaborating with the Interpol Working Group on Wildlife Crime to investigate the origins of all major ivory seizures in the recent past.<\/p>\n

Researchers used analysis of DNA from seized elephant tusks and forensic evidence such as phone records, license plates, financial records and shipping documents to map trafficking operations across the continent and better understand who was behind the crimes.<\/p>\n

The study was published (Monday 14 February) in the journal Nature Human Behavior. They\u2019ve identified key locations where ivory is poached, packed in shipping containers, then moved by truck or rail to port cities \u2013 and how traffickers have shifted operations over time in response to law enforcement.<\/p>\n

Current trafficking hubs exist in Kampala, Uganda; Mombasa, Kenya; and Lome, Togo. Co-author Professor Samuel Wasser from the University of Washington says the focus has been on large shipments of over half a metric ton.<\/p>\n

They have been tracing what they describe as \u201ctransnational criminal organizatons\u201d or TCOs. Wasser says the contraband is moved in large amounts in shipping containers to ports outside of the countries where the poaching happens.<\/p>\n

He says: \u201cIn almost all cases, except for early on, the ivory was being exported out of a different country from where it was poached, which means that, you know, the poachers are on foot and they only have as much as they can carry, and middlemen were going buying the ivory, moving it up to a neighbouring country where it was being consolidated by these big transnational criminal organisations, that l\u2019ll call TCOs, and being shipped out of the country.<\/p>\n

And so it was those TCOs that we believe were the choke point in the trade, if you can, because once the transnational criminal organisations, moving contraband tend to move these large shipments on ships in containerised on ships as marine cargo.<\/p>\n

And 70 percent of the world\u2019s products are moved on ships, so there\u2019s literally a billion containers moved around the world each year. So if you are a transnational criminal, all you got to do is get your consignment through customs into transit and you pretty much got it, made it so hard to trace it once that happens.<\/p>\n

\u201d Wasser says the poaching is concentrated in a few carefully chosen areas.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be a poaching hotspot, you have to be a big area with a huge number of elephants, so you can keep going back to them over and over again. So for example, the biggest hot spot that we saw was in the Selous Game Reserve in southern Tanzania, which is 55,000 square kilometres.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the largest protected area in Africa and the poachers operating in there know that area very well because they they grew up there and trying to find those poachers in an area of that size is extremely difficult and then when you do find them, they only have as many tusks as they can carry.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s not a very big haul and there\u2019s plenty of other poachers that can replace them,\u201d says Wasser. Each year, some 500 metric tons (1.1 million pounds) of poached elephant tusks are shipped from Africa, mostly to Asia.<\/p>\n

Wasser hopes the findings will help law enforcement officials target the leaders of these networks instead of low-level poachers who are easily replaced by criminal organizations.<\/p>\n

He says: \u201cIf you can stop the trade where the ivory is being consolidated and exported out of the country, those are really the key players that you need to get there, the choke point and our work has shown that they have been operating for decades.<\/p>\n

They are the people that the poachers depend on to buy their ivory. So if you can get them, you can break the whole trade. \u201d According to Wasser all of the vast illegal trade in ivory is being organized by a very few well protected criminals.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese TCOs are very few in number, there may be as few as one in a given country and when you look at the movement from Tanzania to Kenya to Uganda and all the connections between them, it may be that it\u2019s really one big organisation that\u2019s driving the whole thing, or three independent ones that are so tightly connected they\u2019re operating as one,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

For the past two decades, Wasser has fixated on a few key questions: \u201cWhere is most of the ivory being poached, who is moving it, and how many people are they?\u201d<\/p>\n

He works with wildlife authorities in Kenya, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and elsewhere, who contact him after authorities intercept ivory shipments. He flies to the countries to take small samples of tusks \u2013 just 1.5 inches (4cm) by 1.5 inches \u2013 to analyze the DNA.<\/p>\n

Sample by sample, year by year, he has amassed the world\u2019s largest collection of ivory DNA \u2013 taken from the tusks of more than 4,300 elephants trafficked out of Africa between 1995 and today.<\/p>\n

The aim is to allow prosecuting authorities to understand how one seizure in one country might be tied to a multitude of others. At the moment he believes short term thinking is a serious problem when it comes to stamping out the trade altogether.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey just want to get it to the prosecution and then say, look, we did a great job, boom, we got these guys.<\/p>\n

But that is a Whack-A-Mole problem because you\u2019re not really getting at the big network, moving them and you end up getting low level people that are involved with that, that you can connect to the shipment, not the big guy.<\/p>\n

And what we\u2019re trying to do is change that investigation so that when a seizure is made, that\u2019s not considered the end, that\u2019s considered the beginning,\u201d says Wasser.<\/p>\n

Wasser says their new techniques give police a vast amount of information which allows them to see a bigger picture. He says: \u201cThat also stops the poaching because the poachers depend on that guy who has been again operating for decades to be there to buy their ivory.<\/p>\n

How do I know they\u2019ve been operating for decades because we have seizures made in 2005 that has a that has a tusk that matches, has several tusks that match close relatives in a seizure made as far away as 2019.<\/p>\n

Same guys there over and over again. And these are protected individuals in these countries. They\u2019re very well connected and and they are the ones that we really need to get.<\/p>\n

\u201d In 2004, Wasser demonstrated that DNA from elephant tusks and dung could be used to pinpoint their home location to within a few hundred miles.<\/p>\n

In 2018, he recognized that finding identical DNA in tusks from two different ivory seizures meant they were harvested from the same animal \u2013 and by definition, the same poaching syndicate.<\/p>\n

The new research expands that approach to identify DNA belonging to elephant parents and offspring, as well as siblings \u2013 and led to the discovery that only a very few criminal groups are behind most of the ivory trafficking in Africa.<\/p>\n

Because female elephants remain in the same family group their whole life, and most males don\u2019t travel too far from their family herd, the researchers hypothesize that tusks from close family members are likely to have been poached at the same time, or by the same operators.<\/p>\n

Such genetic links can provide a blueprint for wildlife authorities seeking other evidence \u2013 cell phone records, license plates, shipping documents and financial statements \u2013 to link different ivory shipments.<\/p>\n

Special Agent John Brown III of the Office of Homeland Security Investigations, who has worked on environmental crimes for 25 years has told Associated Press: \u201cif you\u2019re looking simply at that one seizure, you only have only block of physical evidence \u2026 you wouldn\u2019t necessarily identify a transnational criminal organization behind that trade.<\/p>\n

But the scientists\u2019 work identifying DNA links can alert us to the connections between individual seizures,\u201d says Brown, who is also a co-author of the study.<\/p>\n

The study\u2019s authors say their findings are the backbone of multiple multinational investigations that are ongoing. Traffickers that smuggle ivory also often move other contraband, the researchers found.<\/p>\n

A quarter of large seizures of pangolin scales \u2013 an endangered anteater-like animal \u2013 are co-mingled with ivory, for instance. Africa\u2019s elephant population is fast dwindling, from around 5 million elephants a century ago, to 1.3 million in 1979.<\/p>\n

The total number of elephants in Africa is now estimated to be around 415,000. A ban on international commercial ivory trade enacted in 1989 hasn\u2019t stopped the decline.<\/p>\n

Between 2007 and 2014, the elephant population in Africa declined by 30 percent or an estimated 144,000 elephants, largely due to poaching. Each year, some 500 metric tons (1.1 million pounds) of poached elephant tusks are shipped from Africa, mostly to Asia.<\/p>\n

For More News And Analysis About Mauritius<\/a> Follow Africa-Press<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Africa-Press – Mauritius. In Ivory Coast a group of conservationists and veterinarians are moving this increasingly endangered forest elephant to an area where the animal is less likely to be targetted by poachers. Scientists have been using DNA testing to track how ivory traffickers are operating. As few as three major criminal groups are responsible […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":12261,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,8,9,16],"tags":[233,245,1866,241,1865,1867],"class_list":["post-12262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-homepage-english","category-miscellaneous","category-twitter","tag-africa-press","tag-africa-press-mauritius","tag-elephants","tag-mauritius","tag-trafficking","tag-wild-animals"],"yoast_head":"\nScientists use ivory tusk DNA data to locate poaching networks - Mauritius<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In Ivory Coast a group of conservationists and veterinarians are moving this increasingly endangered forest elephant to ...\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/mauritius\/all-news\/scientists-use-ivory-tusk-dna-data-to-locate-poaching-networks\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Scientists use ivory tusk DNA data to locate poaching networks\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In Ivory Coast a group of conservationists and veterinarians are moving this increasingly endangered forest elephant to ...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/mauritius\/all-news\/scientists-use-ivory-tusk-dna-data-to-locate-poaching-networks\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Mauritius\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/AfricaPressTunisiaa\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2022-03-21T11:52:02+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2022-03-22T08:41:29+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/static.africa-press.net\/mauritius\/sites\/61\/2022\/03\/img-62398b9865284.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1024\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"538\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"cfeditoren\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"cfeditoren\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"8 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/mauritius\/all-news\/scientists-use-ivory-tusk-dna-data-to-locate-poaching-networks#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/mauritius\/all-news\/scientists-use-ivory-tusk-dna-data-to-locate-poaching-networks\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"cfeditoren\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/mauritius\/#\/schema\/person\/068c7ab4e9634ae78ec5d54ec46598bb\"},\"headline\":\"Scientists use ivory tusk DNA data to locate poaching networks\",\"datePublished\":\"2022-03-21T11:52:02+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2022-03-22T08:41:29+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/mauritius\/all-news\/scientists-use-ivory-tusk-dna-data-to-locate-poaching-networks\"},\"wordCount\":1559,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/mauritius\/all-news\/scientists-use-ivory-tusk-dna-data-to-locate-poaching-networks#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/static.africa-press.net\/mauritius\/sites\/61\/2022\/03\/img-62398b9865284.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Africa Press\",\"Africa Press-Mauritius\",\"Elephants\",\"Mauritius\",\"Trafficking\",\"wild animals\"],\"articleSection\":[\"all news\",\"homepage-english\",\"miscellaneous\",\"twitter\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/mauritius\/all-news\/scientists-use-ivory-tusk-dna-data-to-locate-poaching-networks#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/mauritius\/all-news\/scientists-use-ivory-tusk-dna-data-to-locate-poaching-networks\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.africa-press.net\/mauritius\/all-news\/scientists-use-ivory-tusk-dna-data-to-locate-poaching-networks\",\"name\":\"Scientists use ivory tusk DNA data to locate poaching networks - 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