A new study suggests that as few as three major criminal groups are responsible for smuggling the vast majority of elephant ivory tusks out of Africa.
on international commercial ivory trade hasn’t stopped the decline. Each year, an estimated 1.1 million pounds of poached elephant tusks are shipped from Africa, mostly to Asia.For the past two decades, Wasser has fixated on a few key questions: "Where is most of the ivory being poached, who is moving it, and how many people are they?"
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. In 2018, he recognized that finding identical DNA in tusks from two different ivory seizures meant they were harvested from the same animal – and likely trafficked by the same poaching network.
Such genetic links can provide a blueprint for wildlife authorities seeking other evidence – cell phone records, license plates, shipping documents and financial statements – to link different ivory shipments.
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