He said they bury sealed buckets of water along parched travel routes and bury ivory for safekeeping as well. These LRA defectorsall abducted as children and pressed into servicenow fight for the Ugandan military. ", World Elephant Day: Ten facts about amazing elephants, Elephants and the ivory trade: The crisis in Africa, Safer Internet Day: Top tips for when you're online, Rescue services helping as big quake hits Turkey and Syria, We speak to Junior Bake Off champion about winning the show. Andrea Turkalo/The Elephant Listening Project, Andrea Turkalo /The Elephant Listening Project. 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. Michael K. Nichols/National Geographic/Getty Images. Its hissanctuary.. So I said to myself, 'I better go into a very passive mode.' Our next story begins in a place many of us are familiar with - up awake, watching a YouTube video at 3 in the morning. Tongo Tongo shot two elephants one day, she says. And I gotta find a way to get that shine, Dante says, referring to the gloss a clean elephant tusk has. Achellam told me that Konys men planned for the future. Our airport incident was one of many hiccups with the artificial tusks. Instead of signing a peace agreement, Kony had his peace negotiator executed. 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. CORNISH: That's Fanie Pelletier, a wildlife biologist in Canada who wasn't involved in the work. 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: Those changes can ripple through ecosystems. So support charities who put a stop to that. 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. When he returns hours later, he has three chicken dinners and several bottles of beer, paid for by the police chief. Konys response was immediate and savage. Soumaine Abdoulaye Issa had been in Darfur, he told a team of African Parks investigators, when he heard about an elephant poaching mission to Chad led by a member of the Sudan Armed Forces. 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. 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. So far theyve traveled 600 miles from jungle to desert in just under two months. But after Otti left Garamba to participate in the peace talks, Kony began killing elephants for ivory. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. But she knew she had to leave; she's a researcher for a non-governmental wildlife organization, not some kind of soldier-of-fortune. Weve heard he went to Seleka, Idriss Adoums son Issa tells me, referring to the violent rebel coalition that overthrew the CAR government on March 24, 2013. 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. The series was one of NPR's earliest adopters of digital technology and led the network in surround-sound production. For ten years Khartoum supplied him with food, medicine, and arms, including automatic rifles, antiaircraft guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. I unzip my suitcase to expose two fake tusks and hand him letters from the U.S. National Geographic needs your help to protect elephants and to continue reporting on wildlife crime. Researchers in Mozambique found a . 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. TEXT EDITOR: Oliver Payne. Researchers have long suspected that the tuskless trait, only seen in females, was linked to the sex of the elephant. These soldiers are tasked with helping rangers fight poachers and armed groups like theLRA. 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. This behavior is associated with mourning, field researchers say. During the rains the park is more lake than land, and elephants split into two groups to escape the floods. Editor's Note: Viewers may find the next image from the 2013 elephant slaughter disturbing. Normally both male and female African elephants have tusks, which are really a pair of massive teeth. Fifty percent will be tuskless. A forum for discussion about elephants and rhinos and a rally point for those who want to getinvolved. She well remembers the day when the war came to the bai. "It was the 24th of March," she says. Otti liked elephants, Onen recalled, and forbade their killing. Killings of civilians have likewise dropped, from 1,252 in 2009 to 13 in 2014, but abductions are rising again, and it takes the arrival of only a few of the armed militants to send fear ricocheting through communities. They shift a few miles. Then they head south six miles, back into Kafia Kingi. As far as Onen knew, the poaching squad he abandoned was still making its way north from Garamba through CAR to Sudan. As in eye colour and blood type in humans, genes are responsible for whether elephants inherit tusks from their parents. Boko Haram also uses the bush as a baseNigerias Sambisa Forest, a game reserve south of Lake Chad. (Special thanks to the National Public Radio - National Geographic Society Radio Expeditions Sound Collection at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, for sharing the audio.). This limited the trade of some ivory, but trade still continued across the world. 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 elephants coat themselves in red clay. All of central Africa is a hand grenade, its pin pulled by a history of resource exploitation from abroad, dictatorships, and poverty. A sixth, a young lookout, ran down the hill, disappeared, and is presumed dead. "When it gets bad we leave.". Katy Payne/The Elephant Listening Project Where did the tusks end up? National Geographic commissioned the creation of artificial tusks with hidden GPS trackers that were planted in the smuggling supplychain. By Bryan ChristyPhotographs by Brent StirtonPublished August 12, 2015. As she sips her tea in the Providence coffee shop, Turkalo is the picture of calm. Dry season in, rainy season out. My interpretation, says Jean Marc Froment, then director of the park, is that the Ugandan military is conducting operations inside Garamba and at the same time taking some ivory. But, he adds, the poachers could be SPLA, which uses the same type of helicopter seen over the park. So if a tuskless mom had babies CAMPBELL-STATON: She has a 50% chance of passing the trait on to her offspring. Kony even invited foreign press into his camp for interviews. Elephant slaughter increased in the 1950s, where it is estimated that 250 elephants were killed per day. November 6, 1954, Page 3 Buy Reprints. 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. Meanwhile, according to Onen, Konys men hid ivory by burying it in the ground or submerging it in rivers. National Geographic television producer J.J.Kelley takes the floor in the waiting area. By skewing their evolution, humans fiddle with elephants' role in the ecosystem too. The operation was designed by Kony himself, Onen says. Tusk inheritance patterns in the ElephantVoices database backed up that assumption. It also raises many questions. Onen had been part of an LRA poaching operation in Garamba consisting of 41 fighters, including Konys son Salim. Fifty percent of her sons will be tusked, but that other 50% would die. 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. 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. 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. I know which house theyre in: Using Google Earth, I see its light-blue roof on my screen. for their tusks. 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. 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. At that time, about 18% of females there were born without tusks. That's just something to think about and consider really because it's absolutely RIDICULOUS that any animal should have to go through that. Will artificial tusks planted in a central African country head eastor westtoward a coast with reliable transportation to Asian markets? They can get what they want today, he said, and keep it there for two, three, or even more than five years.. Between April 25 and June 17, poachers killed two Garamba rangers and two army officers assisting with patrols. - during that 15-year period had all these cascading consequences, all the way up from, you know, a single gene to an entire ecosystem health. To her relief, the men turned out to be local. 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. Konys men jump back and forth across borders, hiding in countries where governance is weak. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. In Mozambique, past hunting pressure led to an increase of . The New York Times Archives. He was 22 years old the night in 1998 that Konys soldiers raided his village in Gulu, Uganda, and pulled him from his bed. Help News from Science publish trustworthy, high-impact stories about research and the people who shape it. As of this writing, my artificial tusks sent out their last communication from a Sudanese town called Ed Daein, 500 miles southwest of Khartoum. Congos own soldiers threaten the parks southern border, and villagers around the park sometimes poach elephants too. 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. They found that the tuskless trait was genetic, found in the X chromosome, and it was deadly in males. It's nothing extraordinary for humans. In three weeks Konys brutes killed more than 800 people and kidnapped more than 160 children. But Turkalo decided not to leave the region right away. Congolese soldiers undergo training by Mathieu Eckel of African Parks, an NGO that manages Garamba National Park with the DRCs parks authority. 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. Get more great content like this delivered right to you! 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