Genetic testing of ivory shipments seized by law enforcement was utilized by a team led by scientists from the University of Washington and special agents from the US Department of Homeland Security to reveal the international criminal networks behind ivory trafficking out of Africa. The genetic linkages they’ve discovered across shipments reveal an even greater level of organization within ivory smuggling networks than previously thought.
The results of DNA testing of more than 4,000 African elephant tusks from 49 distinct ivory seizures undertaken in 12 African countries over a 17-year span are included in the article, which was published Feb. 14 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
“Exposing the connections among separate ivory seizures made at African and Asian ports sometimes thousands of miles apart will likely boost evidence against the criminals arrested for elephant poaching and ivory smuggling, and strengthen prosecutions of the responsible transnational criminal organizations,” according to lead author Samuel Wasser, a UW professor of biology and director of the Center for Environmental Forensic Science, whose group developed the genetic tools behind this work.
“These methods are showing us that a handful of networks are behind a majority of smuggled ivory, and that the connections between these networks are deeper than even our previous research showed,” said Wasser.
The two elephant species in Africa have been destroyed by illegal ivory trade, habitat degradation, climate change, and other issues. Although authorities seize ivory from elephants who have already been murdered, the tusks can provide vital information by revealing poaching, shipment activities, and traffickers’ connections.
Wasser and his collaborators previously identified tusks from the same elephant that were separated and trafficked in different shipments before being intercepted by law enforcement in a study published in the journal Science Advances in 2018.
Exposing the connections among separate ivory seizures made at African and Asian ports sometimes thousands of miles apart will likely boost evidence against the criminals arrested for elephant poaching and ivory smuggling, and strengthen prosecutions of the responsible transnational criminal organizations.
Samuel Wasser
The discovery of both tusks from the same person linked the two seizures to the same human trafficking networks. Cartels tended to smuggle ivory out of three African ports between 2011 and 2014, according to these efforts: Mombasa, Kenya; Entebbe, Uganda; and Lomé, Togo.
Wasser and his colleagues extended their DNA analysis and testing to include tusks from elephants who were close relatives, parents and offspring, full siblings, and half-siblings in this latest project. Including close relatives broadens the reach of the attempt, according to Wasser.
“If you’re trying to match one tusk to its pair, you have a low chance of a match. But identifying close relatives is going to be a much more common event, and can link more ivory seizures to the same smuggling networks,” said Wasser.
This enhanced technique was evaluated on 4,320 tusks from forest elephants, Loxodonta cyclotis, and savannah elephants, Loxodonta africana, confiscated from 49 separate major shipments totaling 111 metric tons of ivory between 2002 and 2019. The majority of these cargoes might be linked based on similar tusks from the same individual or close relatives, according to the findings.
“Identifying close relatives indicates that poachers are likely going back to the same populations repeatedly year after year and tusks are then acquired and smuggled out of Africa on container ships by the same criminal network,” said Wasser.
“This criminal strategy makes it much harder for authorities to track and seize these shipments because of the immense pressure they are under to move large volumes of containers quickly through ports,” said Wasser.
Most major ivory shipments, which are most typically shipped from Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria, are presumably the result of a few interconnected smuggling networks, according to genetic data. The researchers was able to correlate seizures from a dozen nations in Central and West Africa, extending from Ivory Coast on the Atlantic Ocean to Mozambique on the Indian Ocean, by broadening the study to identify tusks from close relatives.
The bigger analysis may also track how smuggling networks shifted their activities from Tanzania to Kenya and Uganda in the early 2000s, and then to Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo more recently. From Togo to Nigeria, there was a temporal shift in West Africa.
“By linking individual seizures, we’re laying out whole smuggling networks that are trying to get these tusks off the continent,” said Wasser.
One ivory seizure would have resulted in the culprits being tried only for that seizure. However, Wasser and his team’s DNA data could help boost investigations and prosecutions by linking accountable international criminal groups to multiple seizures, resulting in more severe punishments.
Co-authors are Charles Wolock, a UW doctoral student in biostatistics; John Brown III with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security; UW biology research scientists Mary Kuhner, Yves Hoareau, Eunjin Jeon, and Zofia Kaliszewska; Kin-Lan Han, a former UW researcher who is currently a geneticist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; Chris Morris with SeeJ-Africa in Nairobi, Kenya; Ryan Horwitz, who was at the University of Michigan and is now a UW research scientist; Anna Wong and Charlene J. Fernandez with the National Parks Board of Singapore; and Moses Otiende with the Kenya Wildlife Service.
The research was funded by the Paul and Yaffe Maritz Family Foundation, the Wildlife Conservation Network, the Elephant Crisis Fund, the U.N. Development Program, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, the Woodtiger Fund, the Wildcat Foundation, the U.S. Department of State, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, HSI, the World Bank, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, the National Institute of Justice and the National Institutes of Health.
