Elephants in Mozambique's Gorongosa Park are being born tuskless at rates approaching 33% — a genetic signature of 15 years of civil-war ivory hunting that the population is now passing to its daughters

Elephants in Mozambique's Gorongosa Park are being born tuskless at rates approaching 33% — a genetic signature of 15 years of civil-war ivory hunting that the population is now passing to its daughters

In the floodplains of Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, roughly a third of the female elephants born after the country’s civil war have no tusks at all. Before the war, around 18.5 percent of females were naturally tuskless. Among the adult females that survived the conflict, the figure rose to about 51 percent. The difference is not a fluke of one generation. Research published in Science in October 2021 found evidence that 15 years of inte…