It's actually photoshopped. The process will mean the animal has to be sedated. It's really dangerous to sedate a wild animal because nobody knows how they'll react and they might stop breathing or their heart stops beating. Also, horns and tusks grow continually and even just a little bit of undyed ivory will be worth money to the poacher, and so rangers and conservationists would have to track and sedate the animals on a daily basis, which is super expensive and time-consuming. It's a good thought, but there are plenty of experts who agree this will not be effective. (Source: wonderousnature on instagram)
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· 9 years ago
Male Asian elephants have begun to evolve to no longer grow tusks. In some places nearly half of the male Asian elephants are tuskless
Um are you sure? I thought evolving a species took like, ya know,a really damn long time. Even if we've been poaching 500 years I still don't think it still wouldn't manage to fuckin evolve.
They've been hunted for their ivory for over 1000 years in Northeast Asia and Africa. The subsequent removal of the tusk gene has been over a sufficient number of generations to bring a genetic change to the population. 98% of elephants in Sri Lanka are tuskless because of this. There's even a name for tuskless male elephants: Makhna
its happening more rapidly simply because a tuskless elephant is not removed from the breeding population, making it happen at a rate similar to how humans purposely alter domestic animals, if there are 50 males to start with, 5 without tusks, and hunters kill 40 tusked ones, half the breeding population is now tuskless so pass that onto offspring, i have no idea of its a dominant trait or a recessive one, but if its dominant or co-dominant it will speed up the process of creating tuskless elephants significantly.
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