By Meghna Anand
Elephants are known for their incredible sense of family, empathy, memory, intelligence, size, and strength. In primary and middle school, many of us have learned about how these impressive mammals have adapted to survive longer and thrive in the environments they live in. We learn about their thick skin, their memories, their trunk, and their tusks, which prevent them from being wounded easily, help them find waterholes, pick things up, and much more. However, one of these distinctive “features” of the elephant seems to be disappearing… their tusks. Tusks are overgrown upper incisors (teeth) used for digging for water, debarking trees for food, and by bulls (male elephants) to compete for mates. Male tusks are bigger than females’- they can grow to be upto seven times bigger, in fact. And they are often killed for these ivory teeth at or before breeding age. As a result, elephants seem to be evolving, extremely quickly, to never grow them at all.
During Mozambique’s 15-year civil war from 1977 to 1992, 90% of elephants in Gorongosa National Park were killed for their ivory tusks. The ivory was sold to buy weapons and food for the soldiers. Before the war, there were roughly 4,000 elephants living in Gorongosa, but after the war, only 200 adult cows (females) remained. (Now, approximately 530 total live in the park.) Normally, 2-4 percent of all female African elephants don’t grow tusks. After civil war, the number of female survivors that didn’t have them was 51%, and of the cows born after the war ended, 32% have been tuskless.
This phenomenon has also been observed in other parts of Africa. Elephant behavior researcher Josephine Smit monitored elephants (results first presented November 2017) in Ruaha National Park in Tanzania and found out that 21% of cows over the age of five are tuskless. That number grows to 35% in elephants over the age of 25. This suggests that the tuskless elephants are living longer.
But in some cases, rather than adapt to not grow them at all, tusks seem to be getting smaller. In Kenya, the animals underwent a period of intense poaching from the late 1970s to the 1980s. Tusk sizes were examined before and after (1966-1968 and 2005-2013), and the findings were that they had decreased by a fifth in males and more than a third in females.
This leaves us with several questions: why is tusklessness so much more present in females? How is it possible for the elephants to be adapting so quickly? And what implications will tusklessness have on elephants’ ability to survive, as well as that of the animals around them? Elephant patterns of movement and lifestyles have a large impact on the ecosystems they inhabit. The holes they dig are used by other creatures who can’t dig for themselves, and the trees they knock over for food or to clear paths are often provide habitats for small animals. Smit has “observed tuskless elephants feeding on bark, and they’re able to strip bark with their trunks, and sometimes they use their teeth.” Some speculate they might be compensating by developing stronger trunks, but as of yet, no formal studies have been completed, and no reliable results have been published.
