The criminal life has not been hard for ivory smugglers. Operating on vast, unwatched swaths of the African savanna, poachers slaughter elephants for their tusks, which move up through a pyramid of middlemen until they’re loaded en masse into shipping containers and dispatched at international ports. There are customs agents there, but out of roughly one billion containers shipped around the world each year, only one to two percent can be inspected. As the staggering statistics on the illegal ivory trade show, it’s pretty easy to make tons of ivory disappear.
Catching the culprits requires tracing the ivory back to the people who wrested it from the elephants, but doing so is no easy task. These are professional criminals, and they’ve developed a suite of tricks to avoid detection or at least only get caught with smaller seizures. But they seem to have met their match in a team of scientists led by the University of Washington’s Samuel Wasser, Ph.D., whose new paper in Science Advances describes how they used genetic testing to link together individual hauls at various ports, showing that the tusks in those seizures came from the same region and, likely, the same smuggling ring.
“I am very passionate about my work and when the patterns started emerging, it was indescribably exciting and energizing,” Wasser tells Inverse.
“By linking these matching seizures together like links in a chain,” he explained in a teleconference, “we were able to identify what we believe to be the three largest cartels moving ivory during this peak, 2011-2014 period.”
OperaDonor on September 19th, 2018 at 21:38 UTC »
The rows and rows of tusks in that video in the article really illustrate the cruelty at work here. No wonder the researchers are so dedicated.
Braden0732 on September 19th, 2018 at 21:10 UTC »
This is great and it’s good to see new avenues of tracking the ivory trade.
That being said, we’ve been fairly certain about the chain and routs the bulk of the ivory trade follows, including where the money comes from for quite some time. They have been putting GPS trackers in tusks and slipping them into the black market so they can trace step-by-step how ivory travels. This new tracking method is great and far more precise, but the crux of th problem is found about half way through the article.
Still, the methods and data his team has to offer are useless unless local governments cooperate with scientists.
In developing countries ecological and bilogical conservation is not something that is easily conveyed, let alone legislated or enforced. While we can make the argument that it will have a long term return on investment for a country, corruption and short term gains will always win the day. If you look at any developed industrialized nation, conservation did not become an understood and practiced concept until either disasters happened or there was enough wealth to start being proactive with planning.
I’m not trying to be disparaging, but as someone who works in the field of conservation I have to remind myself to be realistic with the implications of studies like this one likely falling on the deaf ears of a corrupt government at worst or understood and not acted upon by lack of resources at best.
ring8210 on September 19th, 2018 at 19:16 UTC »
Link & date of paper: Science Advances 19 Sept 2018