Researchers say they have developed a new way to distinguish between legal mammoth ivory and illegal elephant ivory. 

Elephant ivory is often passed off as mammoth ivory when being imported. As the mammoth is extinct, it is legal to trade this form of ivory as opposed to that from elephant tusks, which was banned in 1989. This loophole has contributed to 20,000 elephants being killed each year for their tusks, according to the WWF.

Now, scientists at the University of Hong Kong think they have found a simple method to distinguish between the two types of ivory. Mammoth tusks, which come from the remains of long-dead animals preserved in permafrost, contain different amounts of isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen to their non-extinct elephant counterparts. The team hopes this technique can be used to crack down on the illegal ivory trade.

Night has fallen; an elephant mother and her calf walk through Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, which covers more than 4000 square kilometres of rainforest in the northern Republic of the Congo. This remarkable photograph above of the critically endangered African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) was captured using a camera trap.

The image is included in photographer year-long project showcasing the park’s rarely seen animals. Working with nonprofit organisation the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), Burrard-Lucas captured the images with a professional-grade digital camera inside a weatherproof enclosure (shown below), combined with lights and a motion-detecting trigger.

“This set-up needs to be rugged and reliable, capable of withstanding extreme weather conditions and the curiosity of wildlife,” says Burrard-Lucas. He consulted with WCS experts about where to place cameras, such as near trails through dense vegetation, which tend to be animal highways.

Burrard-Lucas hopes his images will help efforts to protect endangered species: “If these images inspire even a few people to learn more, visit as tourists or take action for conservation, then they have served a purpose.”

Elephant trunks may be one of the most sensitive body parts in the animal kingdom.

at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin and his colleagues dissected the heads of three Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) and five African bush elephants (Loxodonta africana). All the animals had lived in zoos and died of natural causes or had been euthanised because of severe health problems.

These dissections are rare because the procedure is difficult. “The head of an elephant with the trunk and everything is about 600 kilograms,” Brecht says. “Dissecting them requires specialised machinery.”

The researchers wanted to take a closer look at a trigeminal ganglion, a bundle of nerve neurons involved in sensing in an elephant’s trunk and face. Each elephant has two of them. “We found that it weighs about 50 grams,” Brecht says. “The human retina weighs about 0.3 grams – so this is really very big.”

The researchers also counted around 400,000 neurons in the main nerve coming out of the trigeminal ganglion. This was far more than they expected and only slightly less than the number of neurons they found in the elephant’s optic nerve. Optic nerves usually have far more neurons than nerves related to touch because the visual system is typically a lot more complicated.

The team also found that the nerve in the trunk relating to touch was three times as thick as the optic nerve leading to the elephant’s eye. Brecht says this thickness points to how much information can be carried by the neurons and how precise the trunk’s touch system may be.

“Elephants constantly touch things with their trunk,” Brecht says. “They manipulate things with the trunk, they grasp things – a trunk for an elephant is like having a hand.”

He says this study suggests that elephant trunks may be one of the most sensitive body parts anywhere in the animal kingdom.

“But, of course, we can’t say this for certain based on just one experiment,” says Brecht.

“The tactile nature of the elephant trunk has been largely overlooked compared to other tactile systems – such as primate fingertips and rodent whiskers,” says at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. “It makes sense that the trunk is really tactile.”

“While we often think about the trunk being moveable and for manipulation, all movement and manipulation is guided by sensation,” says Grant.

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More than half the elephants in multiple Thai tourist facilities have nervous tics that may reflect anxiety, frustration or boredom.

The involvement of scientists in the elephant tourism industry has led to improvements in welfare, but many captive Thai elephants still develop repetitive behaviours called stereotypies, which are similar to nervous tics.

at Chiang Mai University in Thailand and her colleagues observed the behaviour of 283 Indian elephants (Elephas maximus indicus) in 20 tourist facilities in Thailand’s Chiang Mai province where elephants give tourists rides, walk side by side with them and participate in shows.

The team found that 57 per cent of these elephants showed repetitive behaviours, including swaying side to side, weaving or pacing around, bobbing their heads, making useless limb movements and rocking back and forth on their feet, at least once in a 15-minute period. This might be their way of dealing with stressful situations like separation from family members or being restrained in chains, or even coping with boredom, says Bansiddhi.

On average, the elephants did these things about six times in that period. The highest prevalence was in elephants aged between 4 and 10. Those younger than 3 and older than 50 were least likely to show these behaviours. Bansiddhi says this is more or less consistent with the statistics her team calculated from direct interviews with 181 mahouts, or elephant handlers, on the animals’ behaviour.

“I’m surprised the figures are not higher than that,” says at the Human Elephant Learning Programs foundation in Australia. “Wherever they chain elephants, there are almost always locomotor stereotypies.”

Mahouts generally separate young elephants from their mothers when they are 3 or 4 years old. Before that, the youngsters may experience relatively little stress, says Bansiddhi. But after the separation, their tics could reflect how anxious they are in their new situation. Older elephants may have simply “learned to cope better with the stress in their environment”, she says.

McLean, however, wonders if older elephants have reached a state called learned helplessness, in which animals give up trying to cope.

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