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Elephant Poaching Research Paper

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CURRENT EVENTS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
SUMMER 2015
ARTICLE: DNA From Elephant Dung, Tusks Reveals Poaching Hot Spots
AUTHOR (S): Brooke Jarvis
PERIODICAL: N/A
DATE: June 18, 2015
WEBSITE ADDRESS: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/140618-elephants-ivory-dna-poaching-africa-science-world/
SUMMARY:
Samuel Wasser, from the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle, has spent the past 15 years comparing and matching DNA samples from elephant ivory and dung in an attempt to locate where the most poaching and smuggling is happening. This research led Wasser and his team to report that since 2006, the smuggled ivory has come from predominantly two areas: the combined region of southeast Tanzania and southwest …show more content…

African elephant ivory trading has been banned for twenty five years yet there is still a large market in Asia. Populations in Tanzania and Mozambique are still decreasing and the African forest elephants face extinction within the next ten years. But Wasser is not alone in the fight against the ivory trade; the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and other international focused bureaus and agencies have taken this issue on, and those agencies are using his research to put traffickers behind bars. The Seattle team received the ivory from Kilindi, and the sheer of amount of ivory means that it must have been distributed by organized crime networks. Because the ivory is professionally smuggled, there is no evidence to point to where the ivory comes from. Wasser knew that they needed to find out where this ivory was being poached, so he created contacts that would send him the dung of elephants. This gave them DNA of different elephant populations which they could compare to the ivory, and allowed him to discover the two places where they

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