This is the beginning

“The oldest elephants wandering Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park bear the indelible markings of the civil war that gripped the country for 15 years: Many are tuskless. They’re the lone survivors of a conflict that killed about 90 percent of these beleaguered animals, slaughtered for ivory to finance weapons and for meat to feed the fighters. Hunting gave elephants that didn’t grow tusks a biological advantage in Gorongosa. Recent figures suggest that about a third of younger females — the generation born after the war ended in 1992 — never developed tusks. Normally, tusklessness would occur only in about 2 to 4 percent of female African elephants.” — National Geographic.

This is an interesting article that was extremely moving for a person to read about. Once you get past the sadness of the article you see an amazing trait evolving throughout the elephant species that was being poached. You can see within a few generations that those elephants are showing traits that don’t include tusks. This falls into a scientific realm of teaching biology and genetic traits through selective breeding.

I would go about teaching this by starting with elephants in the civil war and go generation by generation to now using a Punnett square. This would show how this simply miraculous trait change is happening. People talk about long term evolution but others can’t understand everything. This is an easy way to explain evolution by selective breedings. This can be linked back to the cattle and horse industry today as well.