Story at a glance:
- Kruger National Park officials spotted suspected poacher’s mutilated body on their grounds,.
- Rangers survey the area to prevent poachings in the park.
- At the Gorongosa National Park, elephants without tusks are likely trending due to evolution.
An elephant killed a suspected poacher at a South African safari destination.
On Saturday, rangers at the Kruger National Park spotted a mutilated body they believe was a poacher, CBS reported.
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Rangers are tasked with surveying the park to prevent poachings. Kruger spokesman Isaac Phaahla said the suspect left behind a working cell phone that could be used to track down any potential accomplices.
“Initial investigations suspect that the deceased was killed by an elephant and left behind by his accomplices,” Paahla said, according to CBS.
A similar incident happened in April: A suspected rhinoceros poacher was mangled to death by a herd of elephants at the park, and rangers found his body, The New York Post reported.
Poachers seek to kill elephants for their tusks, but new research has emerged that elephants are being born without tusks.
As Changing America previously reported, a new study details how ivory poaching may have driven a rapid evolution of tusklessness in female African elephants in parts of Mozambique.
During the Mozambican Civil War, both sides of the conflict hunted elephants for ivory as a way to finance their war efforts.
“Humans are the most influential evolutionary pressure in history besides the five major mass extinction events,” Shane Campbell-Staton, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton told Business Insider.
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