Tusklessness protects elephants at park

ADDO, South Africa — Through the narrow slit of the underground hide in front of the water hole, an African morning revealed itself. The sun painted the earth orange. A lion stepped out of the bush, and a small herd of perfectly camouflaged kudus, a large antelope-like animal, started and bolted away.

Soon, a single bull elephant appeared where the lion had been, shaking his head as if scanning the bush. After a while, five female elephants descended the orange hillside to drink.

Even from a distance, it was easy to tell they were females; in South Africa’s Addo Elephant National Park, they are almost always the ones without tusks.

In most African elephant populations, as few as 2 percent of the cows lack tusks. But among Addo’s 300-odd females, the rate is 90 percent to 95 percent, a trait that has evolved rapidly over the past century.

And at least partly as a result, Addo’s elephants have been spared something else: poaching.

“Addo elephants might be the biggest success story anywhere,” said the park’s conservation manager, John Adendorff. “So maybe it’s not a bad thing that they don’t have tusks. Tusklessness has helped protect them.”

In Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, widespread poaching during that country’s civil war in the 1970s to 1990s killed off disproportionately large numbers of elephants with tusks.


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