Selling elephants ivory – a hard white material from elephant tusks, for which elephants are often killed – is illegal. Selling ivory collected from the remains of extinct mammoths, however, no one – no one. Because it is difficult to describe the two separately, illegal traders are slipping under the radar with huge ivory legally trading with ivory ivory. A new forensic tool, however, may soon eliminate this nefarious move.
Wildlife forensic scientists in China suggest that the officials can analyze elephant ivory from the mammoth ivory by analyzing. Stable isotopes (The form of an element that does not break over time). If this approach is widely adopted, it can serve as a quick sample screening before the application of more expensive and time -consuming methods.
“Mammath Ivory is priced at a fraction of the price of elephant ivory, but both are considered to be completely different materials by cars and experts, as the Mammath Ivory usually causes deep, creamy white colors of elephant Ivory,” Powell Toropov, researcher university of Hong Kong and a co-author of published today is published today. FrontiersSaid in a front statement“A businessman compared him to one ‘Lamborghini and a Ford’. Mammath Ivie Elephant may not be a real option for ivory, but its value may be a legal cover for ivory ivory.
Currently, the most accurate way to explain two Ivory is through molecular analysis (studying molecules) or radiocarbon dating (a technique for organic materials), which are both expensive and taking time.
The isotope ratio varies depending on factors such as environment. Since the preserved ice edge mammoths in high-ending Siberian permifrost lived in a completely separate residence from today’s tropical elephants, the isotope ratio in their tusks should be different. In this context, Toropov and his team decided to investigate whether analyzing these differences could be a better way to distinguish between two types of ivory.
The team performed stable isotopes on 44 pieces of elephant ivory and 35 pieces of giant ivory, especially studying the stable isotopes of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur. While this perspective revealed notable overlap for carbon, nitrogen and sulfur isotope ratio between two Ivory, researchers documented very low overlap in elephants and mammoth isotopes for oxygen and no one for hydrogen.
“This is because in high latitudes such as Siberia, the water elements in the water elements by mammoths have individual isotopes signed in tropical latitudes in tropical latitudes,” the first writer Maria Santos also explained to Maria Santos, a researcher from the University of Hongk. Simply put, analyzing the stable isotope ratio of oxygen and hydrogen in a suspected ivory object is an effective way to determine whether it comes from an elephant or a giant.
Santos said, “More research is required before using this approach,” we hope that the protocol described in our study will allegedly apply on the screen of large batch of huge Ivory objects, “Santos said.” Santos said. “Samples in which there is an isotopic signatures of ivory ivory, then tested with more expensive and time -taking methods, such as lingam ivory is an isotopic sign Is. This illegal ivory can help trading more effectively and closure potential laundering loopol. “
The way I see it, there is an even more simple solution: make all ivory illegal.
