The Mozambique civil war created tuskless elephants

EVOLUTION ENSURES that animals are well-adapted to their circumstances. Sometimes, as with predators and prey, those circumstances include the behaviour of other creatures. And, as a paper just published in describes, that includes the behaviour of human beings, which can force drastic changes on a species in an evolutionary eyeblink.Shane Campbell-Staton, a biologist at Princeton University, studies how animals adapt to human creations like cities and pollution. His interest was piqued by a film about the tuskless female elephants of Gorongosa National Park, in Mozambique. Their lack of tusks was thought to be a consequence of another human creation—the Mozambican civil war, which lasted from 1977 to 1992 and was partly paid for by the killing of elephants for their ivory. Around 90% of the pachyderms living in Gorongosa are thought to have been killed. Biologists therefore wondered if rising tusklessness might be an adaptation to make elephants less attractive to human hunters.