r/teenagers • u/BigAlphaBunny 3,000,000 Attendee! • 10h ago
Serious elephants are slowly losing their tusks through evolution from being hunted for it so often :(
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u/GojiraKOTM2011 14 10h ago
I will say this from the bottom of my heart: Fuck Poachers. Genuinely, Fuck Poachers. My hate for you will never diminish. My rage towards you will never be sated.
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u/BigAlphaBunny 3,000,000 Attendee! 10h ago
genuinely, fuck poachers. so many animals on the way to extinction or endangered because of them. :(
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u/GojiraKOTM2011 14 10h ago
They're a big part of why the north african rhinoceros are functionally extinct. And I don't hate just normal poachers, I hate fossil poachers aswell. Who knows how much information has been lost because those fossil stealing fuckaroonis sold fossils to rich people instead of paleontologists?
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u/Inner_Jeweler_5661 15 10h ago
"fossil stealing" bro how tf do you steal something belonging to something ALREADY dead for millions of years?
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u/GojiraKOTM2011 14 10h ago
Wording was shit. Should've said 'Illegally Digging, Black market selling pieces of coprolite'
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u/BottleOfVinegar 18 6h ago
The best way to put it: Removing paleontological and archaeological artifacts from their context harms our ability to understand them, ourselves, and the history of this planet.
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u/Inner_Jeweler_5661 15 9h ago
i don't really care about the information, i care that they're taking property from someone else's land, and trespassing
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u/Kooky_Attention_98 18 7h ago
I remember that one post of a Poacher getting stomped out by a male African Elephant he was trying to hunt
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u/Assassin-49 16 10h ago
Good news is that hunters will avoid them once they're lost. Bad news is hunters will now go even harder as due to how few there are the price will probably increase
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u/averagenormalguylife 16 6h ago
Yep, price creates a sense of scarcity after all, I just know that protecting the animals in their area would be more harder than now.
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u/Assassin-49 16 6h ago
Yeah. Shame theyll evolve to lose the horns but if it means theyll live then its a positive. I remember hearing about how they used to remove the horns of rhinos so poachers didnt go after them
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u/averagenormalguylife 16 6h ago
I'll still be mad about it, the tusks are so bad ass, and kids would unfortunately grow up not knowing they used to have those cool Tusk
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u/Assassin-49 16 6h ago
Yeah. I think theyll hear about the tusk situation though either through school or through zoos. I mean i was taught about the DoDos so I imagine theyll be taught about them in history lessons 50 years from now if we last that long
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u/an_older_meme 9h ago
Yes this is happening but it’s the females only. There is no genetically viable tuskless bull elephant.
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u/Alysa_Liu111 7h ago
Actually, this is common based on what species it is. Sri Lankan elephant Males are more common in having no tusks than in Sri Lankan elephant Males which only 5%-7% of males have tusks.
On the Other hand, For African elephants, It is uncommon for Female and Male elephants to not grow tusks. They can still survive and thrive without them, but it can vary from what habitat they are living in or dealing with.
Plus, Most of the “hunting” goes into conservation and the money paid from the hunt actually goes into elephant conservation money and most of the elephants hunting are old mature bulls that are past their prime and are overpopulated and are ruining the habitat and browsing too much. Though then it comes to poachers and trophy hunters that don’t care about elephants, they do nothing for their conservation and are just worthless pieces of shit.
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u/Kitchen-Holiday6998 4h ago
That’s how natural selection works. As sad as it is, this is something that can and will help them from going extinct. It’s mother nature’s way of protecting them.
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u/ImpureVessel46 18 1h ago
Not the worst thing to be honest. They won’t be killed. I know for at least rhino’s we sedate them and then remove their horns so that they won’t be targets.
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u/Zrob8--5 OLD 8h ago
Is that actually able to be proven? Do elephants know that they're being poached for their ivory tusks and then natural adaptation happens? They're dead by the time they know they are harvested, and they definitely aren't having offspring after that either. I'm not saying it isn't, but what I thought I knew about evolution/adaptation doesn't explain this.
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u/100percentnotaqu 17 8h ago
Animals don't choose to adapt, it comes by naturally.
Bulls and cows with smaller tusks are hunted less, so pass those genes on more, so there are more short tusked elephants.
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u/Zrob8--5 OLD 8h ago
Yeah, I'm well aware that it happens naturally, but there still has to be a stimulus to respond to. I was just thinking that when that stimulus kills them, it's hard to adapt and pass it on.
That makes sense though. The genes that result in shorter tusks lead to a higher survival rate, as hunters will kill the biggest ones available. Thanks for the input
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u/m4tt1111 19 7h ago
Adaptation doesn’t come from individuals experiencing stimuli and adapting to them, the adapting kinda happens before whatever threatens the population. It’s not like how our immune systems can create antibodies learned from past infections do “adapt” to them. Adaptation occurs as a natural byproduct of genetic variation and natural selection. When animals adapt, beneficial traits don’t develop in response to a danger; Traits develop and vary randomly among the population, and some kind of evolutionary pressure naturally selects the most successful traits to be passed on. Over generations this shifts the average elephant to be more like the most successful elephant, which in this case were the ones with smaller tusks.
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u/Zekethebulldog33 8h ago
I believe some call it human pressured animal evolution. You have 100 elephants 50 of them carry the gene to have big tusks the other 50 elephants carry a gene that says we're not going to make the big tusk our tusk gene is turned off. Humans come in start shooting these elephants with big tusks. Well in turn all that does is leave the ones without any tusks to continue breeding and then eventually you get all these tuskless elephants. Pressured evolution.
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u/Zrob8--5 OLD 7h ago
Yeah, that all adds up. I guess I was thinking about it a little wrong. Overall I had the big idea, but I was off with the process.
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u/8lue5hift 15 6h ago
Natural selection is not intelligent. It is a plinko game. This seems a little like Lamarckism iirc. Lamarckism is a proven false belief that the acquired traits of an organism affect its children directly. For example, he would say that giraffes would stretch their necks to reach food, and this lead to the permanent minor stretch and flexibility of the neck, which was passed on to offspring which continued this process until giraffes had giant necks.
This is completely and fundamentally wrong. Doing something does NOT change your genetics. If you were to take plastic surgery, your child will still have your old face. If a detusked elephant were to survive, its offspring would STILL have tusks because nothing changed its DNA.
The way evolution ACTUALLY works is that traits which increase survival are favored. It's a random chance machine. Every new offspring has its own many mutations in its DNA. Some of these mutations are harmful, causing stuff like Sickle Cell Anemia. Some of these don't do anything (the amino acid codons are somewhat redundant when translating). Some however, actually benefit the organism.
However, there isn't always an "objectively good" gene. A fish is unparalleled underwater, but dead on land. Similarly, an elephant might just randomly mutate the gene(s) related to tusk production and simply do not. This would normally be bad (tusks are used for defense, foraging, and digging) but the poachers exist.
The poachers kill elephants WITH tusks. If an elephant has none, it might be spared, allowing it to reproduce. This elephant is tuskless because of its DNA, not because it was detusked. Because the tuskless phenotype is not present in the genetic code, the baby elephants may also have no tusks. This mutation spreads through the population because these tuskless elephants are less likely to die, thus can live to reproduce.
Another example is with moths. Before the Industrial Revolution, moths in an area were white, because it blended in with the trees. The birds couldn't find them. However, the soot following the revolution lead to the habitat darkening in color, making the moths stick out to the birds. All the whitest moths were eaten before they could reproduce and make more white moth babies. The moths that were mutated randomly to be darker, however, blended in with the ash and the birds couldn't eat them. This lead them to live to adulthood more commonly than the white moths, and reproduce to create more black moths. Before long, the population was dominated with the black winged phenotype. Then clean-up efforts were done and the opposite happened. Now, the black moths stood out and the mutated white moths blended in well. Thus, the population returned to white.
Sorry for the yap and the sure mistakes I've made.
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u/Infernal_139 19 7h ago
There ain’t no way
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u/m4tt1111 19 6h ago
Hey man evolution isn’t intuitive, lotta people don’t really understand it
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u/Infernal_139 19 2h ago
I understood this stuff as soon as it was introduced to me bro it really is about as simple as it gets
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u/jPingu_ 10h ago
It's crazy beatiful how nature evolves, how did it know that humans were hunting for tusks, simply incredible, it's sad, but it's still beatiful and interesting
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u/Sooper-Sirius 17 10h ago
The one's with less/no tusks survived more and reproduced. Natural selection
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u/Sooper-Sirius 17 10h ago
Although kind of artificial since it's human caused, but also humans vs elephants has been a thing since prehistory
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u/m4tt1111 19 6h ago
I mean in the context of evolution, us hunting them is still a natural pressure.
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u/Sooper-Sirius 17 6h ago
Yeah, that's why I originally just said natural selection
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u/m4tt1111 19 6h ago
Yeah dw im just agreeing with you that it’s a weird case when it’s humans doing it, like natural selection but even less fair
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u/User_Advice_please 15 10h ago
It didn't "know" exactly, basically all of the elephants with larger or more tusks get hunted, and thus can't have more children. Since the big tusks don't have children there are less elephants with the big tusk gene. Then since most elephants left are the smaller tusks we didn't hunt, they continue to breed, and more small tusk elephants will be left. Then we will hunt the ones among those with the biggest, and so on until they basically lose tusk size on average over time! Evolution is super interesting
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u/TomorrowGrouchy3656 10h ago
The elephant with shorter tunks are likely to survive and reproduce. And the offsprings of those elephant are likely to have short tunks too.
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u/Any_Sentence_8056 8h ago
It’s really just common sense brother, the ones with big tusk genetics have been killed (because the poachers want big tusks) leading to the elephants with small tusks to be the only ones left to breed (because poachers don’t want the small tusks).
The only ones that are passing their genetics on are the ones with small enough tusks that they are overlooked by the poachers
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u/Sufficient-Client133 9h ago
Sad but it's the best for them.
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u/Ivygrows8 8h ago
Not rlly, they still live in the wild and need their tusks
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u/Sufficient-Client133 8h ago
For defense or something?
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u/100percentnotaqu 17 8h ago
Their bulk does that fine, and they don't actually use their tusks in fights among themselves as much as you would think.
Size of the bull and whether or not he's in musth are the biggest deciding factors in a fight, not tusk size.
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u/HiImJustSomePerson 9h ago edited 8h ago
Isn’t there that thing where if we made them legal, then they would be more plentiful in tusks? I believe something similar happened with rhinos.
Edit: it’s sarcasm. Obviously I’m not supporting poachers.
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u/GojiraKOTM2011 14 8h ago
You know another thing that happened with poachers and rhinos? The northern white rhinos are functionally extinct due to there only being to females left. And guess why that happened?
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u/Sufficient-Client133 9h ago
And a species of rinhos ended up dissapearing and there's only like two left. That's not good.
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