To discover more about the criminal networks sustaining this trade, researchers in the US, Kenya and Singapore have extracted as much data as possible from the products of illegal elephant ivory trafficking in Africa.

The new study analysed the DNA of tusk ivory seized from 49 large shipments impounded in African ports between 2002 and 2019. The researchers sampled 111 tonnes of ivory from at least 4,320 poached African elephants – a fraction of the total haul. These included ivory from the savanna and forest elephant species which are both listed on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of threatened species.

African savanna elephants, which live in the grasslands of eastern central Africa, have declined by at least 60% over the past 50 years, but the number of forest elephants, found in western central Africa, has decreased by more than 86% in 31 years.

While 111 tonnes may sound like a lot of tusk, it is likely the tip of the ivory iceberg. The new analysis indicated where many elephants are being poached in Africa, where they are being shipped from and the consumer markets in south-east Asia and elsewhere they are destined for. It found that most tusks came from repeated poaching of the same elephant populations and implicated a handful of large, interconnected networks. This knowledge could help law enforcement officials link multiple shipments to a single group, thereby tying together a raft of crimes and illuminating the true scale of criminal activity.

Inside the ivory trade

Remarkably, the data indicates that most of the 49 shipments confiscated from across Africa contained ivory from the same bands of close relatives. This suggests the tusks of several elephants poached in one place were split up and packed into separate shipping containers for transport: mainly on cargo ships, although some went via road or rail to different countries. By spreading their illegal load across numerous vessels, traffickers reduce the risk of losing a large ivory store. With nearly one billion shipping containers travelling the world each year, not all of them can be thoroughly checked.

The new data indicates that the power brokers of the elephant ivory trade network are transnational criminal organisations. Matching tusks that came from elephants in the same families – including parents and offspring and siblings – between different shipments helped to identify three major criminal groups based in Mombasa in Kenya, Kampala in Uganda and Lomo in Togo.

The Mombasa and Kampala groups may well be arms of a single large organisation, with links across east Africa and south-east Asia. Nevertheless, the possible links between criminal groups, ports and countries described in the study are probably an underestimate, given the high likelihood that most illegal ivory shipments pass undetected. There are practical constraints on DNA sampling and analysis too – not all tusks in every captured shipment can be genetically analysed.

I was alarmed to learn that my old stomping-ground, Uganda, where I was privileged to see and be among wild elephants on numerous occasions, has become a hub for this trade. The ivory illegally shipped from Uganda in this study was not principally from Ugandan elephants, but drew heavily from populations in Tanzania and Kenya instead. The data also revealed a growing web of connections between ports in different countries, indicating the expanding reach of the criminal organisations in the network.

The most recent seizure in the dataset also contained 12 tonnes of scales belonging to pangolins – the most poached animals in the world. Other ivory shipments included rhino horn. In many cases, the cover load in containers hiding animal parts is timber, but even the timber tends to originate from illegal harvests. This shows that criminal organisations behind ivory trafficking are routinely engaging in multiple wildlife and environmental crimes involving many other protected species and laundering the revenue.

Trafficking groups may change which ports they use to distribute ivory to evade increased law enforcement at an existing one. These groups appear to be large, with transnational transport networks. This means that effective law enforcement must be similarly expansive and adaptable, involving government at various levels, scientists, conservation groups and the private sector. The role of institutional corruption cannot be overlooked either. At least some of the impounded ivory was taken from a Burundi government stockpile.

Including the tusks that were not sampled, lead author of the study Samuel Wasser estimates the number of elephants represented by the total haul at 17,619. Some quick maths suggests that approximately 84,945 tonnes of elephant mass was removed, over 17 years, from the ecosystems which these animals contributed to – roughly equivalent to three times the weight of the Statue of Liberty. Considering the majority of illegal ivory shipments that pass through undetected, the scale of this ecological loss is massive.

Understanding the networks that illegal wildlife products travel can help. But while there is demand for elephant ivory, poaching and illegal trafficking will continue. Alongside more effective law enforcement, there must be a major effort to promote behaviour change among the people who buy illegal wildlife products and so fund the trade.

Investment in and ownership of illegal wildlife products must become a badge of shame rather than a status symbol.

Jason Gilchrist, Ecologist, Edinburgh Napier University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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OXFORD, 17 December 2020 – An international team has discovered the origin of the largest cargo of African ivory found from the oldest shipwreck in southern Africa.  

The discovery of a 16^th-century shipwreck has, with the aid of advanced scientific techniques, provided detailed insight into elephant herds living in Africa almost 500 years ago. But the study also highlights the extensive depletion of the West African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) due to the ivory trade, and the need for conservation of this majestic animal. The study, published today, was led by Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum and School of Archaeology alongside partner institutions in Namibia (the National Museum of Namibia), South Africa (University of Cape Town, University of Pretoria) and the USA (University of Illinois). 

This unique story that links shipwrecks with elephants came to life off the coast of Namibia in 2008, when workers mining for diamonds discovered the remains of the Portuguese trading vessel Bom Jesus. The ship was lost in 1533 AD en route to India, making it the oldest shipwreck discovered in southern Africa.Incredibly some of the ship’s structure and over forty tons of valuable cargo were recovered intact – including thousands of copper pieces (ingots), gold and silver coins. 

But the most fascinating items recovered from the Bom Jesus were a collection of over 100 elephant tusks, the largest archaeological cargo of African elephant ivory ever found. The tusks were of varying lengths and sizes, ranging in weight from 2-33 kg, and came from both male and female elephants, young and old alike. The tusks were in good condition thanks to the cold waters off the coast of Namibia caused by the Benguela ocean current. 

Elephant tusks are the source of ivory, which was a valuable commodity in the 1500s and would have been used to make jewellery, mirrors and combs, decorative items and religious objects. Tusks were often traded from Africa to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, but to find such a large number of tusks, and so incredibly well preserved, made this a unique find.  

“The shipwreck cargo contained materials from different parts of the world – Central European copper, German finance, Portuguese ship and perhaps crew, African ivory all destined for western India. This is an amazing snapshot of how connected the world was by the 1530s,” said Professor Shadreck Chirikure, School of Archaeology at Oxford University who led the study at Oxford University alongside Dr Ashley Coutu, Research Fellow at Pitt Rivers Museum. 

A team of experts – scientists, archaeologists and curators – came together to study the tusks and learn more about the elephants who bore them, before they were killed for their ivory. This is the first study to combine genetic, archeological and historical methods, providing much greater detail than ever before about the origin, ecological, and genetic histories of an archaeological ivory cargo.  

Scientists extracted ancient DNA – the chemical in the cell of every living thing that contains its genetic code – from the ivory to trace the source region and family history of the elephants. Ancient DNA analysis of 44 tusks determined that the elephants were Loxodonta cyclotis, or African forest elephants, rather than Loxodonta africana, savannah or grassland elephants. Further DNA sequencing traced the elephants to West Africa, which was surprising as it was expected the elephants would be from different locations across both Central and West Africa where trading networks to move ivory over long distances had been established thousands of years before the sailing of the Bom Jesus.    

Another surprise was that the elephants did not live in deep forests as most forest elephants do today. Dr Coutu studied the chemical elements in the tusks (stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen – isotopes are also used to determine the age of fossils through radiocarbon dating) to reveal that these elephants actually lived in scrubby woodland savannahs, not the deep tropical forests along the West African coast where almost all forest elephants live. “This information gave us a picture of the ecology of the West African forest elephant in its historic landscape. Knowing more about historic environments in which forest elephants thrived will benefit wildlife conservation today,” said Dr Ashley Coutu. 

But the research also reveals a loss of West African forest elephant herds in the last 400 years. The team found that the cargo came from 17 different herds with a distinct family lineage. Of those 17, only 4 of those same lineages still exist and are known from modern West African elephant populations. This means that the other lineages have been lost, primarily due to the hunting of elephants for ivory that took place in the centuries that followed.  

“The other lineages disappeared because West Africa has lost more than 95% of its elephants in subsequent centuries due to hunting and habitat destruction,” said Alfred Roca Professor of Animal Sciences from the University of Illinois who worked together with Oxford University on the project. The genetic information recovered from these lost herds adds a huge amount to the relatively limited amount of data available for scientists to study the remaining forest elephants across the African continent.     

The ivory trade, which continued up until the 20^th century, devastated Africa’s elephant population. Estimates suggest the population reduced from 26 million elephants in 1800 to fewer than one million today. A worldwide ban on ivory sales was instituted in 1989, which reversed the downward trend in the population. Despite the ban, the ivory trade continues illegally, and an estimated 20,000 elephants are killed in Africa annually. 

This research study was led by Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University, one of the leading and best-known museums of anthropology, ethnography and archaeology in the world. It holds over 500,000 items acquired across 130 years, covering all periods of human existence.  

Pitt Rivers leads research on its collections and is actively exploring difficult histories and addressing the colonial past. Oxford School of Archaeology hosts world-class research facilities fundamental to addressing big questions relating to humans and their interaction with the environment in the past. This collaborative research across continents has provided an opportunity to look at the legacy of the ivory trade. But it has also introduced a new way to examine the vast collections of historic and archaeological ivories in museums across the world and showed the vital significance of science in this work.

“There is tremendous potential to analyse historic ivory from other shipwrecks, as well as museum collections. These scientific techniques are vital for understanding the histories of elephant populations, people who hunted and traded the ivory, as well as the global history of the ancient ivory trade, which increasingly drew Europe, Africa, and Asia together via the Atlantic Ocean,” said Dr. Ashley Coutu, Research Fellow, Pitt Rivers Museum. 

Source: Oxford University
Photo credits: National Museum of Namibia
Map created by Alida de Flamingh

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Silent Forests is an intimate, character-driven portrait of conservationists and activists who are struggling to stop forest elephant poaching in Africa’s Congo Basin region. The film explores this story through a range of dynamic subjects; including one of Cameroon’s first female eco-guards, a grassroots wildlife law enforcement group, a Congolese biologist studying elephant behavior, a reformed elephant poacher, and a team of anti-poaching sniffer dogs led by a Czech conservationist.

We begin deep in the forests of Congo-Brazzaville with biologist Clement Inkamba-Nkulu. Clement researches elephant clearings in the Bateke Plateau, doing acoustic monitoring to evaluate the abundance of elephants living in this dense forest. His studies are part of a larger regional effort called the Elephant Listening Project. The ELP studies forest elephant communication to help deepen our understanding about how these complex and intelligent animals “speak” with each other and form social bonds.

In neighboring Cameroon, we meet eco-guard Sidonie Asseme, a mother of five who has worked as a park ranger for the last decade –one of Cameroon’s very first female eco-guards. She treks for weeks on end in the dense jungle, searching for poaching camps – and her dedication has led to the arrest and detention of 15 poachers and counting. Not surprisingly, though, her work has made her a target: she has received death threats, beatings, and was once locked in a house by poachers who threatened to set her and three other rangers on fire.

An important part of Sidonie’s job is bio-monitoring, or observing the various animals that come and go from park clearings. Her favorite animals to see in the wild are the forest elephants; but in these same clearings that she used to see plentiful elephant herds at, she now sees none. “The poaching has scared them all off, they are really threatened here.” To drive home her point, she and her fellow eco-guards find recently abandoned poaching camps all around the clearings they are monitoring.

The film then goes from the depths of the forest to the chaotic streets of Yaounde, to meet Eric Tah and the LAGA Wildlife Law Enforcement Group. LAGA is a grassroots group of dedicated Cameroonian activists that have carried out countless operations into the web of wildlife crime in this region. They are just launching a new investigation into a trafficker who calls himself “Sans Peur”, or “Without Fear.” We observe the hours of work and planning that go into a sting operation. These investigations come with a high risk, especially when the criminals one is targeting are well-connected. Adding to the difficulties is the endemic corruption at some of the highest echelons of police and government ministries. The filmmakers embed with LAGA’s undercover unit and follow the anatomy of an investigation from start to finish – including the critical moment that a trafficker is taken down.

In the Republic of Congo, sniffer dogs are used for finding endangered species products that poachers are attempting to smuggle out of the country. This dog team is led by Arthur Sneigon, a Czech conservationist who has spearheaded anti-poaching activism in Congo since 2014. Recently, Arthur has struggled to get permission from the government to continue his sniffer dog operations. He laments that he is stuck in a web of bureaucracy and corruption, with administrators demanding bribes that he cannot pay. Arthur is part of the same activist network as Eric’s group LAGA, and the two sometimes work together across country borders to take down wildlife criminals. The film follows Arthur from Congo to Cameroon, where he is part of an investigation into a major ivory trafficking network – with a ringleader who smuggles ivory through a U.N. refugee camp.

The final focus of Silent Forests is Jean-Paul, a former elephant poacher who now owns a small cocoa farm and herd of goats. He is the head of a support group of reformed poachers in this area; they are atoning for their past actions and finding less destructive ways of making a living. We attend a meeting of this support group, where Jean-Paul and other members discuss the recent increase of poaching in the area, and plans for the future of their alliance.

Jean-Paul speaks about the poverty that drove him to poach in the first place, and he expresses regret at his decades of slaughter. “When I killed them, I felt terrible. The elephant – it’s like a person. When you kill them, the family sees it, and flees into the forest. If you hunted the Dad elephant, who did the Mom live with after that? What happened to his family?” The irony that his own concern for feeding his family caused him to decimate elephant families isn’t lost on Jean-Paul.

As passionate and tenacious as these conservationists are, they are up against huge institutional challenges like corruption and lack of funding that threaten to derail all their attempts to fight for the future of the forest elephant.

Silent Forests is Mariah Wilson’s third film about wildlife crime and illegal trade; it is a subject she is both passionate about and familiar with. Mariah’s hope is that this documentary will shed light on the severity of the situation in central Africa, and how damaging the ivory trade is for all species — humans included.

The film stands out from some other recent documentaries about poaching issues because three of the four main characters are from either Cameroon or Congo. This is about African activists, scientists, and eco-guards and who care deeply about what is happening in their own backyards. Mariah wants audiences to leave Silent Forests with a realistic look at what it is like to be on the frontlines of conservation in this region day to day – including the dangers, the rewards, the frustrations – and how good efforts are riddled with challenges from dishonest and inept government entities.

Urgent measures are need to save the remaining African forest elephants. Illegal poaching for ivory and encroachment into elephant habitat must be halted, and the international demand for ivory, which fuels poaching and the illegal trade, must be stopped.

More information: https://silentforests.com

Watch the documentary

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