Remember When Elephants Had Tusks?

Boing Boing links to an interesting story today. If an antibiotic kills 95% of a germ species, but 5% bear a gene for resistance, indiscriminate use of it will result in a surviving line of entirely resistant germs. But on a slightly larger scale, genetically tusk-free elephants are gaining ground relative to their tusked brethren, says one study, thanks to a nasty antibiotic called poaching. If elephants don't have the decency to go extinct, maybe they'll just hang around to tusklessly remind our grandchildren where billiard balls originally came from, and to invite us to ponder what the last poacher was thinking as he shot the last tusked elephant.

Comments

One has to wonder...

[ZSpade]

How that poacher is going to get that gun past zoo security...

I seriously doubt they'll go extinct, but tusked elephants may go extinct in the wild.

This one is bound to cause controversy

[FidelCatsro]

I have advocated this before , but one sure way to stiff up the elephant populations and to eliminate illegal poaching is to create elephant farms.
In doing so we create a reputable ivory trade , a great source of work for the local communities ,a new source of food and a strong elephant population.
I am not talking about factory farming as i find that disgusting , It should be rather free range .
It could also double as a safari trip , ivory could be harvested via profitable hunts (then sold on , including selling of the meat) .

Re:This one is bound to cause controversy

[molo]

Why not just harvest the ivory when the elephant develops maturely sized tusks, instead of killing the animal?

-molo

Re:Interesting...

[TheSloth2001ca]

Evolution has no will, no path, no agenda, no nothing. It can't be forced, pressured, coerced, etc.

However by modifying the selective pressures we can have large influences on the directions of evolution. While humans did not create the tuskless phenotype we are contributing to its increase in abundance

Do you know what "survival" means?

[Scrameustache]

On CNN the other day, I heard this referred to as "survival of the fittest," which was one of the dumbest things I had heard in weeks. The anchor implied that because tuskless elephants used to be 5% of the elephant population and now they're 8%, this means that more elephants are being born with the tuskless gene, which could be completely false. If I have 100 elephants, 5 of them tuskless, and I kill 37 of the tusked elephants, 8% of the elephants are now tuskless - Darwin it ain't.

THIS was one of the dummest thing I've read in weeks.

If you kill elephants, and some survive because of a genetic trait: It's survival of the fittest.
In this case, the fittest being the ones less likely to be shot due to a genetic predisposition to refrain from growing big shiny tusk with high resale value.