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I was in Tanzania last summer and saw elephants in one of these parks where poaching is a big problem. We were lucky to see them; it was beautiful. Our guides

I was in Tanzania last summer and saw elephants in one of these parks where poaching is a big problem. We were lucky to see them; it was beautiful. Our guides told us that natural selection causes elephants there to grow ever smaller tusks, making them less attractive to poaching. That seemed somewhat hopeful to me: maybe evolution will happen fast enough so they can re-bounce in numbers after they produce no ivory anymore.

cyberferret 10y ago
Or else the smaller tusks will mean poachers kill more elephants each hunt to meet their ivory tonnage criteria?!? Could be a double edged sword. I heard on a podcast recently that the main cause of elephant deaths in the 1920's and 1930's was.... the manufacturing of billiard balls. Apparently it took roughly 2 elephants worth of tusks to manufacture one set of ivory billiard/snooker balls. Astounding - whereas a piano keyboard would usually only take up less than 1/2 a tusk because they used laminated sheets of ivory. At least we can be thankful that the modern plastics industry was born out of the need to create 'artificial ivory' billiard balls which exhibited the same bounce and noise properties. Although one could argue that modern plastics are a whole ecological blight in their own right...
GuiA 10y ago
> Our guides told us that natural selection causes elephants there to grow ever smaller tusks Huuuuuh... scientific source on that? Seems like an extremely specious claim, given the life span of elephants, and the fact that poachers are probably happy to harvest ivory even if the elephant has slightly smaller tusks.