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If you fail to develop decorations that play an important everyday role in finding food and water, survival becomes a bit harder for African elephants, but saves them from targeted wildlife traffickers. Despite the falling black market price for ivory – from £ 800 a pound to £ 250 pounds over the past four years – elephants still die at a rate of 55 animals a day to feed demand for precious goods in the Far East. While the world's World Wildlife Center last month brought world leaders to London, in order to make tactics to save the elephants, the largest land mammal on the planet seems to be the most vulnerable to survival.
One of the best areas witnessed by Darwin's evolutionary theorists on the spot is the arid forest of the Mozambican National Park Gorongos, which testified to some of the toughest attacks on elephants in vivid memories.
During the civil war of the 1980s that damaged the East African country, up to 90 percent of the elephant population in the park was given a broken item sold to finance weapons, while their meat was fed to fighters.
According to a new report from National Geographic, about a third of female elephants born after the end of the war in 1992 have never developed a tinder.
This is compared with the usual figures between two to four percent inconsistencies in African elephants.
Elephant behaviourist and National Geographic Explorer Joice Poole tells the magazine that her research shows that 200 adult women – about 51% of the animals survived the war and were older than 25 – they have no tusks, while 32 percent of those born of the war are useless.
An elephant expert told National Geographic: "Once there has been a great deal of pressure on the hunting of the population, parochists begin to focus on older women, but, over time, with the older population, you start to get this really larger part of the females without pain."
Watching elephants without their iconic decoration is not restricted to Mozambique. It is a phenomenon that has testified in other parts of Africa that has damaged the smuggling of ivory.
In Addo Elephant National Park in South Africa, up to 98 percent of 140 female elephants collapsed until the early 2000s.
Although elephant kiki is important as a defense against predator attacks, as well as a useful tool for removing bark for food, as well as digging water and minerals, those who no longer develop large external teeth do not seem to be limited by their absence.
For Ryan Long, a national geographic researcher and scientist at the University of Idaho, the way in which the elusive elephants adapt to their lifestyle, the focus is a new study between ecologists and genetic researchers.
Using GPS cakes, the team follows six adult females, three of which have tusks, so they can analyze their proper diet. The study is also important for other species, as elephants play a role in influencing habitats by lowering trees and creating water holes.
"All or all of these changes in behavior can lead to changes in the distribution of elephants across landscapes, and these are the wider changes that will most likely have consequences for the rest of the ecosystem," said Long National Geographic.
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