“The careful work that Wittemyer and colleagues have done here is badly needed,” added Alberts, who was not involved in the study.
A surge in elephant deaths at the hands of poachers also coincided with the spike in the price of black-market ivory bound for sale at Chinese markets, Wittemyer said.
“We found that the rise in poaching was very closely related to the local price of black-market ivory,” he told AFP.
“Basically, when the price of ivory got over $30 per kilogram, the killing rate started becoming unsustainable,” he added.
“It became really high and a really big problem, and unfortunately that price got up to around $150 per kilogram.”
– Destroying families –
Even more, since poachers tend to aim for the largest elephants with the biggest tusks, the loss of males in their prime breeding years and family matriarchs is upsetting the creatures’ social groups and leaving bands of orphans to fend for themselves.
“Thousands of elephant families are being disrupted or destroyed,” Wittemyer said.
Elephants are faring better in places like Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, where protections are in place.
However, the outlook is dire for about three-quarters of all elephants, particularly those in central Africa, Tanzania and Mozambique, he told AFP.
The key to reversing the trend is to curb the demand from ivory markets in the Far East, he said.
“Somehow we need to break this cycle, this consumptive cycle, of using ivory as a product in those markets,” Wittemyer said.
The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.
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