Tuskless elephants have better defence now

Tse Kan Ming
Aug 24, 2017 · 3 min read

So you might have come across this Independent article being shared around social media before:

And it has caused quite a commotion online. A lot of angry and upset netizens trawling for more.

I feel neither anger or sadness, but some type of relief, that many of the elephants of the next few generations will be freed from the danger of getting poached for ivory due to their lack of tusks.

If you aren’t really able to understand why they are now born without tusks, it is actually equivalent to how humans have bred traits for tameness in wolves since 15,000 years ago to the domesticated dogs we have in our homes today. I still consider it natural selection even though others may disagree. It is still natural selection because we, like any other tertiary animal, hunt for prey and shape the size of their populations. Our industries have affected the color of pepper moths. They have either white colored wings or black colored wings and during the Industial Revolution, the bark of trees near factories turned darker, favouring the “black wing gene” as more of the black peppered moths were able to camouflage on the tree trunks while their white amigos stood out like a sore thumb on the blackened background and got eaten by birds. Likewise, if we have continuously hunted for elephants with tusks, the gene pool would have naturally shifted to favour the “tuskless gene” because only the elephants without tusks were able to successfully mature to adulthood and breed. Hence a larger percentage of offspring now have the “tuskless gene”.

In 2008, scientists found that even among elephants that remained tusked, the tusks were smaller than in elephants’ a century before — roughly half their previous size.

— Independent, 2016

So we have changed the gene pools of many plants and animals, whether intentionally or not. We have unwittingly disrupted ecosystems during our travels to oceanic islands by bringing in invasive species and so while we blame ourselves for contributing to mass extinctions in the last few decades, I’d also like to point out that our human activities have actually also led to an abundance of new species. Yes, new species! Betcha didn’t think of that.

So the age of humans dominating the planet may not actually be such a dire situation (besides global warming and pollution). For the elephants, they are merely thriving in this age where we are the biggest players. We play a huge role in shaping natural selection for animals because we dominate so many parts of the world. So while their lack of tusks may seem a little strange and upsetting to us now, I am also pleased at the irony that what used to be the elephants’ line of defence, now absent, is an even better advantage for them to fend off poachers and live their peaceful lives.

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Tse Kan Ming

✉: ofRavensandDesks@outlook.com // Biology undergraduate seeing the world for the first time every day. I have an interest in many, many things // Singaporean.

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