Poachers 'have created breed of tuskless elephant'

In a woeful version of natural selection, ivory poaching may be causing Asian elephants to lose the gene that allows them to develop tusks, conservationists claim.

Smaller than their African cousins, wild Asian elephants have been even more persecuted through hunting and habitat loss. They have been reduced to a fraction of their former range, with perhaps fewer than 50,000 animals remaining in the wild, in the Indian subcontinent and Indo-China.

In contrast to the African species, not all male Asian elephants grow tusks. The ones that do are the ones being hunted by ivory poachers, so the tusk gene may well disappear from the population.

About 40 to 50 per cent of the animals are normally tuskless, but in Sri Lanka it has been found recently that more than 90 per cent of the population are not growing tusks, perhaps because of the poaching effect.

"When you have ivory poaching, the gene that selects for whether an elephant has tusks or not will be removed from the population," said Paul Toyne, a species conservation officer of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). "Animals that don't have tusks must have some sort of recessive gene, which might normally be shown in the next generation, but once the males with tusks are removed they will not have the opportunity to pass on these genes. It is an alarming situation."

Another noticeable effect of ivory poaching is a sexual imbalance, with a large proportion of the males being removed.

Wild Asian elephants are already in dire trouble, a WWF report six months ago made clear. They are being forced out of their forest homes by logging, agricultural clearance and ill-planned development schemes, poisoned by plantation workers, shot by farmers, and killed for their meat and hide as well as their tusks.

Mass movements of people and resettlement programmes have led to clashes between humans and elephants, the report stated. "As clearance of forests for settlement and agriculture escalates, traditional elephant migration routes are disrupted, leading to violent clashes when hungry elephants raid crops. As a result, hundreds of people are killed by elephants in Asia every year."

Of perhaps 50,000 wild Asian elephants ­ less than 10 per cent of the numbers for African elephants ­ most are squeezed into increasingly smaller woodland areas in the 13 countries in which they survive.

Ivory poaching is severely affecting the sex ratio in southern India, Cambodia and Vietnam. Two years ago, poachers in Cambodia had slaughtered so many bull elephants for their tusks that the country was thinking of importing bulls from neighbouring Laos.

This year, six Asian elephant "tuskers" had been poached in India's Corbett National Park in the foothills of the Himalayas, where they were supposed to be strictly protected, the WWF said yesterday.

The international ivory trade was outlawed around the world in 1989 and remains banned, but a lucrative black market continues to flourish.