New Tools to Curb Ivory Poaching

Despite a long-standing international ban on ivory trade, African elephants continue to be killed in large numbers for their prized tusks. But a team headed by UW biologist Sam Wasser has devised a new means of determining the geographic origin of ivory, which could prove a potent tool in slowing elephant poaching and the illegal ivory trade.

It is relatively easy to monitor elephant populations with flights over the open savannas of eastern, central, and southern Africa, but much harder to do the same in the dense forests of central and western Africa. Those forests are where elephants are currently being slaughtered wholesale, says Wasser, who holds the UW’s endowed chair of conservation biology and is director of the Center for Conservation Biology.

“My colleagues working in the forests are saying, ‘There are no elephants left here,’” he says. “That’s the problem—in the forest you don’t notice the change in population until it’s so dramatic that it’s almost too late to do anything about it.”

The African elephant population plummeted by 60 percent—from 1.3 million to just 500,000—between 1979 and 1987, largely because of ivory poachers. An international agreement banning ivory trade was enacted in 1989, but still three of the largest ivory seizures have occurred since 2002.

In June 2002, authorities in Singapore seized a shipment of about 6.5 metric tons of ivory bound for the Far East. The shipment included 532 whole tusks, many more than six feet long, and 41,000 small carved ivory cylinders about the size of hanko stamps, used for document signatures. The cylinders alone were worth more than $6 million.

The new methods developed by Wasser’s team are being used to show generally where such ivory came from, alerting authorities to specific areas where added enforcement is needed to curb poaching.

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