Researchers used genetic testing on shipments of ivory confiscated by law enforcement and were able to trace the international crime ring that shipped ivory from Africa.
The study establishes familial links between elephants that are being hunted for their ivory tusks and reveals an interrelationship between poaching and shipping practices and smugglers.
Such DNA espionage work could uncover tactics employed by international criminal organizations, the research team believes, which includes scientists and special agents from the US Department of Homeland Security. According to the study, these illegal organizations have operated out of Africa for decades, leading to the massive decline of thousands of elephants in recent years.
“These methods are showing us that a handful of networks are behind the majority of trafficked ivory, and that the connections between these networks go deeper than our previous research,” said lead study author Samuel Wasser, a professor of biology at the University of Washington. and co-executive director of the Center for Environmental Forensic Science, in a statement.
Adding Elephant Family Members
Making a connection between separate seizures of ivory at ports thousands of miles apart could create a trail of evidence and strengthen cases against those arrested for poaching and smuggling.
The new research broadens DNA analysis to find elephants related in some way, including parents, offspring, and siblings. Making connections between elephant families, rather than trying to match individual teeth, helped researchers understand the scope of the trafficking network.
According to the new paper, the three networks established in the 2018 study are “associated with many more seizures and more connected to each other than previously thought.”
“If you’re trying to match a tooth to its pair, you have a low chance of a match. But identifying close relatives is going to be a more common occurrence, with more ivory seizures being linked to the same trafficking network.” Maybe,” said Wasser.
Special Agent John Brown, study co-author and a criminal investigator with the US Homeland Security Investigations, has worked on environmental crime issues for more than 25 years. The forensic analysis in the study could provide “a roadmap for far-reaching multinational collaborative investigations,” Brown said.
target population
The teeth came from both forest elephants and savanna elephants. Forest elephants represent about 6% of the remaining African elephant population and live in the wet forests of West Africa and the Congo Basin. Based on tusk data from the seizures, a large amount of tusks were poached from Gabon and the Republic of Congo.
Savannah elephants roam the grasslands and shrublands in West and Central Africa and most of East and Southern Africa. Many of his teeth were poached in Tanzania, northern Mozambique and southern Kenya – some of which were from the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area in southern Africa.
Then, tusks were shipped from ports in various countries. But the fact that the detached teeth were still shipped from the same ports helped the researchers determine that the massive ivory shipments were running fewer networks than previously suspected, Wasser said.
In elephant populations, females stay in the same family group and males do not migrate very far after migration. The genetic linkage between the teeth showed how predators targeted specific populations. Tight family ties were found in dozens of shipments, some of which spanned years.
“Identifying close relatives indicates that poachers are likely to return to the same population repeatedly – year after year – and then acquire and smuggle tusks from Africa on container ships by the same criminal network, Vassar said.
“This criminal strategy makes it very difficult for authorities to track and seize these shipments because they are under enormous pressure to move large quantities of containers through ports quickly.”
holding smugglers accountable
A small group of smuggling networks is most responsible for large ivory shipments, which can carry large quantities of tusks on container ships., Tusk’s genetic data linked seizures from the Ivory Coast to Mozambique with the Atlantic Ocean bordering the Indian Ocean.
“There have been a lot of movements to make the sale of ivory illegal in many countries around the world,” Wasser said. “However, when we’re getting these big seizures, it hasn’t had much of an impact on the type of business we’re talking about. And when I say a big seizure, that’s half Tons have a minimum size and can go up to 10 tons or more.
The study’s 17-year span also showed how networks have shifted over time to various ports, moving from Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda to Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Criminals are often linked to an ivory shipment seizure, or “a block of physical evidence,” Brown said. But tracking such data could help prosecutors establish links and ensure that criminals are held accountable for everything they do.
“Species extinction and ecological collapse through wildlife trafficking can have long-lasting, irreversible, devastating effects on our global community,” Brown said. “So the global effort to combat these illegal crimes is paramount to protecting our environment.”