Explorers Depart For DRC to Fight Elephant Poaching--One Vial of Scat at Time

By Kyle Dickman and Trip Jennings

Today, I'm packing. After two years in the works, we’re kicking off the Elephant Ivory Project in earnest on Sunday morning when Andy Maser and I fly to Kinshasha, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with a case of collection vials and the goal of saving a species. Here’s the back story.

A couple of years ago, I met Dr. Samuel Wasser, the director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington and an expert on African elephants, at a meeting for National Geographic Explorers in Seattle, Washington. Wasser has been working on a project for a decade that compares DNA sampled from seized elephant ivory to reference DNA sampled from wild elephant scat in Africa. (Just a reminder: the trade of elephant ivory has been banned internationally since 1989.) With this information, Wasser is able to determine where elephants with a DNA makeup similar to that found in the seized ivory live. Because individual elephants from the same population have many similar genes, and because poachers tend to repeatedly target specific populations, Wasser’s study is a valuable conservation tool. The information allows willing governments and NGOs to direct anti-poaching units to threatened herds, thus stopping the trade before the animals are killed.

At least, that’s how it works in theory. Last year was one of the worst for elephant poaching in recent memory. Nearly six percent of the 450,000 African elephants in the wild were killed, and elephant numbers in the DRC are down to less than 10 percent of what they were historically. If poaching continues at this rate, African elephants will be extinct outside of protected areas in the next couple decades. Andy and I got involved with Wasser to stop that from happening. He’s sampled elephant scat across most of the animal’s range in Africa, but there are a small handful of regions in the eastern DRC that haven’t been sampled for reasons obvious to anybody familiar with Central African politics. For the better part of the past 20 years, the eastern DRC was home to the most violent conflict since World War II, and despite the signing of a peace accord in 2008, more than 2 million displaced peoples still live in camps dispersed throughout the country. The situation has improved greatly, but stability remains a long way off. A militia attacked the DRC’s president, Joseph Kabila, on February 11.

“It’s a war-torn nation. People are raping and killing women and children and we’re asking them to control their poaching?” Wasser says. “It’s complicated. But that doesn’t mean we should stop.”

Over the next six weeks, Andy and I will be sampling elephant feces in four different locations. Cosma Wilungula Balongelwa, the Administrative Director General of the ICCN (DRC's wildlife management agency), and John and Teresa Hart, two conservationists that have been working in the jungles of the DRC for 30 years, have agreed to help us. To reach the locations of these un-sampled herds, we’ll be taking pirogues on the Congo River and its tributaries, riding motorcycles through recent battlefields, and collaborating with local tribes in some of the most remote jungles of Africa. Thanks to Spot Messenger, you can follow our progress on the map at our website, our tweets at @EPfilmsTV and @amaser, and our blogs here on National Geographic Adventure. Wish us luck!

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Well all I can say is that the tsunami that recently hit Japan was a good thing for the elephants.

Such a wonderful animal being treated like this ,its so sad . O well Japan karma is a bch

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Wow, impressive trip of a lifetime! I hope you don't forget to use the camera, can't wait to see more pics. I wish I had the time to do something like this this year, good luck!

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It is a long battle for the people who want to protect the elephant...

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To reach the locations of these un-sampled herds, we’ll be taking pirogues on the Congo River and its tributaries, riding motorcycles through recent battlefields,

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[Sarah Stott]

How tragic that the native elephant population is shrinking so quickly. Hats off to Samuel Wasser, Trip Jennings and Andy Maser and the rest of the international environmental community for helping the DRC conservationists stop this terrible situation.