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As a result of poaching, the number of females born without fangs increases in Monzambico: this strange anatomical characteristic, which was present in 2 to 4% of the cases, concerns about a third of women today. To indicate that there is an unpublished study, announced in National Geographic by researcher Joyce Poole, co-founder of Elephant Voices.
The study, carried out in the Gorongosa National Park, highlights a phenomenon that is beginning to be observed in other parts of Africa: in the South African park of Addo, for example, in the early 2000s, 98% of the 200 women present were without fangs. ; In Kenya, however, a study conducted in 2015 by Duke University in collaboration with the Kenya Wildlife Service showed a reduction in the number of defenses.
"We are still struggling with specific cases found in populations of very small elephants," said Luigi Boitani, a zoologist at Rome's Sapienza University and an expert in conservation biology. "It is possible that poaching has led to an artificial selection of elephants without fangs, which would have found a" trick "to survive, but the hypothesis, as suggestive as it may be, remains to be verified. It is also plausible that the disappearance of the fangs is a simple phenomenon of genetic drift, due to a random change in the genetic variability which, in such reduced populations, could have caused this character to spread more and more ".
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