This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Steve Mursky. Got a minute?

There are about 50,000 elephants a year being killed right now with only about 450,000 left in Africa.

Samuel Washer, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of

Washington.

And one of the complexities of this problem

is dealing with this transnational organized crime

where you have these sophisticated networks

of criminal entities that are experts

at moving contraband from one place to another without it being

detected.

Lassar spoke February 14th at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement

of Science in Washington, D.C.

What we have done is we've tried to focus our tension using genetics to determine the source

of the actual poaching and to figure out how many major source populations are there.

Because in doing that you can potentially focus law enforcement on those areas.

Now the way that we focus on this work is we use DNA from large ivory seizures worth a minimum of a million dollars and that is the seizures that bear the signature of large organized crime syndicates.

The work we published in science last July

showed that virtually 100% of all large ivory seizures that we analyzed in the last decade came from really just two locations.

22% of the ivory was made up of forest elephant ivory and that came from an area we call the Tridum, which is the northeast

corner of Gabon and northwest corner of Congo.

And 78% of the Ivory was Savannah ivory and that all came from Tanzania and the areas just

bordering Tanzania. So Tanzania clearly is the biggest hotspot that we have encountered in this trade.

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