TORONTO—In 2015, Andy Huynh was accompanying wildlife guards in Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve to help ward off poachers. Fresh off a decade of service in the Middle East with U.S. Special Operations Forces, he thought there was little that could faze him. But when he saw his first poached rhinoceros, with half of its face sawed away for the horn, he turned and threw up. “I knew then and there I wanted to dedicate my life to stopping wildlife crime,” Huynh said.
He began to work with various wildlife protection nonprofits, then joined a series of U.N. and Interpol undercover operations in China and Vietnam to bust up the illegal trade in elephant ivory. Now, he has extended his definition of wildlife to the distant past: the great, tusked mammoths and mastodons of the ice age.
At the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) here last week, Huynh argued that the growing trade in ivory from the ancient carcasses now emerging as Arctic permafrost thaws is sustaining a global market that leads to the death of living elephants. He urged paleontologists to raise their voices against the fossil ivory trade—and avoid dealing with unscrupulous collectors who might be involved in it.
Some researchers question whether there are enough data to prove ancient ivory really is buoying the demand for elephant tusks, but others at the meeting welcomed his call to action. “Andy did a great job of making his case,” says Thomas Holtz, a paleontologist at the University of Maryland, College Park. “Plenty of SVP talks address mass extinction or even the death of an individual, but those are separated from us by an immensity of time. This dealt with death and suffering happening right now.”
Ivory from African and Asian elephants commands up to $3000 per kilogram on the black market, primarily in Southeast Asia, where it is mixed into traditional medicine and carved into status-signifying statues and other trinkets. About 55 African elephants are killed every day for their tusks. But stricter poaching laws and China’s closing of legal ivory carving facilities in 2018 have made it harder for suppliers—sometimes tied to criminal syndicates—to source elephant ivory, Huynh said. “In order to make up for decreasing supply, organized crime has turned to using mammoth ivory.”
According to Huynh, criminal organizations in Russia pay good money for private tusk hunters to find and extract mammoth ivory from the melting permafrost. “The rest of the skeleton is either destroyed on the spot or lost to erosion,” he said.
He noted a 2014 report from wildlife conservation researchers Lucy Vigne of Oxford Brookes University and Esmond Bradley Martin, which found that since 2002, sales of mammoth ivory had grown from almost nothing to about 40% of all ivory items sold in Beijing and nearly 70% in Shanghai. Huynh also presented more recent, unpublished data from a 2018–19 joint operation by Interpol and the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime that suggested both elephant and mammoth ivory are continuing to enter Vietnamese and Chinese markets, primarily on Russian shipping containers that at times also contain illicit drugs and weapons.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora monitors and regulates the trade of items such as elephant ivory and rhinoceros horn, but it has no explicit protections for extinct animals such as mammoths or woolly rhinos. “So, the trade for mammoth ivory is left unchecked and growing … and the global criminal network has clearly taken advantage of this loophole,” Huynh said.
The harm extends to today’s elephants, he argued. He noted that although mammoth ivory surged into the market, the overall demand for elephant ivory appears to have remained constant or even grown. His conclusion: Ancient ivory isn’t replacing elephant ivory, but is instead sustaining the market’s appetite for it. Some traffickers may even be passing off elephant ivory as legal mammoth ivory, he says, noting that it can be hard to distinguish between the materials in smaller worked pieces, such as trinkets and beads.
Vigne, who did not attend the conference but watched a recording of Huynh’s talk, says it’s unclear just how mammoth ivory is affecting demand for elephant ivory in mainland China. Some research suggests the rise in mammoth ivory has led to less elephant poaching. Vigne’s own visits to mainland Chinese ivory markets suggest “mammoth ivory has certainly helped reduce elephant ivory, but it has also provided a route to [continue to sell] elephant ivory,” she says. “So, it’s a tricky one.”
What is needed, Vigne says, is more information on just how much worked elephant ivory is being trafficked under the guise of legal mammoth ivory. Victoria Herridge, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, agrees. “You need passionate, activist voices [like Huynh’s], but you also need data.”
Thomas Carr, a paleontologist at Carthage College and Huyhn’s undergraduate mentor, notes that paleontology also has a stake in limiting the trade: The sale of fossil ivory reduces the number of mammoth carcasses available for study. “If fossils are being destroyed for tusks, you lose so much data,” he says. “It’s a loss for science and it’s a loss for society.”
SVP and the broader paleontological community can help, Huynh says, by issuing public statements and putting pressure on elected officials and international regulating bodies. Scientists should also avoid obtaining samples from unscrupulous tusk hunters, he says, as they might be collaborating with collectors who are also employed by criminal organizations. Holtz agrees paleontologists should do more, saying, “I don’t think most of us understood that fossils were being run in the same shipments as, for example, heroin.”
Jessica Theodor, a paleontologist at the University of Calgary and SVP’s outgoing president, says SVP has for decades issued statements decrying the loss of scientifically significant fossils to commercial trade. In the wake of Huynh’s talk, though, she says the society will establish a task force to investigate what more it can do to protect mammoth ivory.
Source: Science Mag