Poaching is at its all time highest across Africa, with more elephants and rhinos being slaughtered now than ever before.

Some wildlife parks opt to use drones to scan the horizons for poachers on the prowl to fight it, but National Geographic investigative journalist Bryan Christy had something else in mind.

Finding poachers is one thing, but knowing where the tusk or horns end up is another. And that is exactly why Christy enlisted the help of a taxidermist to fit GPS trackers onto fake elephant tusks so that he could track their movement and uncover the smugglers’ routes.

“I will use his tusks to hunt the people who kill elephants and to learn what roads their ivory plunder follows, which ports it leaves, what ships it travels on, what cities and countries it transits, and where it ends up,” he wrote in his National Geographic article.

By connecting the tusks to Google Maps, Christy revealed that his team could see them move over 53 days from south-eastern Central African Republic, through South Sudan, the Radom National Park, eventually stopping in Sudan.

Part of the reason why Christy decided to tackle the issue, was that Tanzania alone has seen a 60% decline in its elephant population in the last five years – dropping from 110 000 to just over 40 000.

He said that some of the times the tusks are traded for goods, but the vast majority end up in China.

“Most illegal ivory goes to China, where a pair of ivory chopsticks can bring more than a thousand dollars and carved tusks sell for hundreds of thousands of dollar,” he wrote.

If you want to see how the tusks were tracked, or where they are now, National Geographic has created a really cool website that details the whole journey. The article is also the inaugural piece to launch the National Geographic Society’s Special Investigations Unit, which will report on wildlife crimes.

“By the time you read this, my tusks might have gone to Khartoum. Or possibly even shown up in illegal ivory’s biggest consuming country: China. Meanwhile, as leaders in Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S. strategise about how to stop the ever-expanding network of international terrorist organisations, somewhere in Africa a park ranger stands his post, holding an AK-47 and a handful of bullets, manning the front line for all of us,” he concluded.

[Source – National Geographic, image – CC by 2.0/Earth Touch]