Genetic assignment of large seizures of elephant ivory reveals Africa’s major poaching hotspots

Focused on protecting a few The illegal ivory trade threatens the persistence of stable wild elephant populations. The underground and covert nature of poaching makes it difficult to police. Wasser et al. used genetic tools to identify the origins of elephant tusks seized during transit (see the Perspective by Hoelzel). The majority of source animals were part of just a few wild elephant populations in Africa—and just two areas since 2006. Increased focus on enforcement in a few such areas could help interrupt poaching activities and restore wild elephant populations. Science, this issue p. 84; see also p. 34 Tracing the origins of elephant ivory pinpoints two major poaching areas. [Also see Perspective by Hoelzel] Poaching of elephants is now occurring at rates that threaten African populations with extinction. Identifying the number and location of Africa’s major poaching hotspots may assist efforts to end poaching and facilitate recovery of elephant populations. We genetically assign origin to 28 large ivory seizures (≥0.5 metric tons) made between 1996 and 2014, also testing assignment accuracy. Results suggest that the major poaching hotspots in Africa may be currently concentrated in as few as two areas. Increasing law enforcement in these two hotspots could help curtail future elephant losses across Africa and disrupt this organized transnational crime.

[1]  S. Wasser,et al.  Quantifying past and present connectivity illuminates a rapidly changing landscape for the African elephant , 2013, Molecular ecology.

[2]  S. Wasser,et al.  The ivory trail. , 2009, Scientific American.

[3]  S. Wasser,et al.  Long‐Term Impacts of Poaching on Relatedness, Stress Physiology, and Reproductive Output of Adult Female African Elephants , 2008, Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology.

[4]  Sylvain Arlot,et al.  A survey of cross-validation procedures for model selection , 2009, 0907.4728.

[5]  N. Georgiadis,et al.  Genetic Evidence for Two Species of Elephant in Africa , 2001, Science.

[6]  F. Maisels,et al.  Forest Elephants: Tree Planters of the Congo , 2009 .

[7]  N. Patterson,et al.  Estimating and interpreting FST: The impact of rare variants , 2013, Genome research.

[8]  C. Foley,et al.  Rapid population growth in an elephant Loxodonta africana population recovering from poaching in Tarangire National Park, Tanzania , 2010, Oryx.

[9]  M. Stephens,et al.  Using DNA to track the origin of the largest ivory seizure since the 1989 trade ban , 2007, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[10]  P. Smouse,et al.  genalex 6: genetic analysis in Excel. Population genetic software for teaching and research , 2006 .

[11]  A E Gelfand,et al.  Spatial modelling of multinomial data with latent structure: an application to geographical mapping of human gene and haplotype frequencies. , 2000, Biostatistics.

[12]  S. Kalinowski,et al.  Revising how the computer program cervus accommodates genotyping error increases success in paternity assignment , 2007, Molecular ecology.

[13]  G. Stenhouse,et al.  Scat detection dogs in wildlife research and management: application to grizzly and black bears in the Yellowhead ecosystem, Alberta, Canada , 2004 .

[14]  R. W. Burn,et al.  Dissecting the Illegal Ivory Trade: An Analysis of Ivory Seizures Data , 2013, PloS one.

[15]  B S Weir,et al.  Estimation of the coancestry coefficient: basis for a short-term genetic distance. , 1983, Genetics.

[16]  D. Western.  In the dust of Kilimanjaro , 1997 .

[17]  J. Andrew Royle,et al.  ESTIMATING SITE OCCUPANCY RATES WHEN DETECTION PROBABILITIES ARE LESS THAN ONE , 2002, Ecology.

[18]  George Wittemyer,et al.  Illegal killing for ivory drives global decline in African elephants , 2014, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[19]  Matthew Stephens,et al.  Assigning African elephant DNA to geographic region of origin: applications to the ivory trade. , 2004, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[20]  S. O’Brien,et al.  Patterns of molecular genetic variation among African elephant populations , 2002, Molecular ecology.

[21]  P. Arctander,et al.  Isolation and characterization of microsatellite loci in the African elephant, Loxodonta africana. , 1998, Molecular ecology.

[22]  F. Wilkinson,et al.  Quenching of triplet states of organic compounds by chromium(III) tris(hexafluoroacetylacetonate) in benzene solution as a result of energy and electron transfer , 1983 .

[23]  Arnaud Estoup,et al.  A Spatial Statistical Model for Landscape Genetics , 2005, Genetics.

[24]  P. Diggle,et al.  Model‐based geostatistics , 2007 .

[25]  Bethan J. Morgan,et al.  Elephants, Ivory, and Trade , 2010, Science.

[26]  P. Donnelly,et al.  Inference of population structure using multilocus genotype data. , 2000, Genetics.

[27]  E. Ostrander,et al.  Polymorphic microsatellite DNA loci identified in the African elephant (Loxodonta africana) , 2000, Molecular ecology.

[28]  Phyllis C. Lee,et al.  The Amboseli elephants : a long-term perspective on a long-lived mammal , 2011 .

[29]  Bethan J. Morgan,et al.  Devastating Decline of Forest Elephants in Central Africa , 2013, PloS one.

[30]  S. Wasser,et al.  Isolation of DNA from small amounts of elephant ivory , 2007, Nature Protocols.