Nuke test radiation can help fight elephant poaching

Researchers have developed a new weapon to crack down on elephant poaching and track Illegal Ivory, using nuclear test residue to determine the age of a tusk.
University of Utah researchers developed the new technique that can tell when the animals were born and when they died to fight poachers of elephants, hippos, rhinos and other wildlife.
By measuring radioactive carbon-14 deposited in tusks and teeth by open-air nuclear bomb tests, the method reveals the year an animal died, and thus whether the ivory was taken illegally, researchers say.
"This could be used in specific cases of ivory seizures to determine when the ivory was obtained and thus whether it is legal," said Thure Cerling, senior author of the study.

"The dating method is affordable and accessible to government and law enforcement agencies," costing about USD 500 per sample, says the study's first author, geochemist Kevin Uno, who did the research for the University of Utah.
"It has immediate applications to fighting the illegal sale and trade of ivory that has led to the highest rate of poaching seen in decades," said Uno.

Not only can the method help wildlife forensics to combat poaching, but "we've shown that you can use the signature in animal tissues left over from nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere to study modern ecology and help us learn about fossil animals and how they lived," said Cerling.

The method uses the "bomb curve," which is a graph - shaped roughly like an inverted "V" - showing changes in carbon-14 levels in the atmosphere - and thus absorbed by plants and animals in the food chain, researchers said.
The carbon-14 was formed in the atmosphere by US and Soviet atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in Nevada and Siberia from 1952 through 1962.
Those levels peaked in the 1960s and have declined ever since but still are absorbed by and measurable in plant and animal tissues.
International agreements banned most trade of raw ivory from Asian elephants after 1975 and African elephants after 1989. In the US, raw and worked African ivory (jewelry, figurines, gun and knife handles) is legal if it was imported before 1989 or, if worked ivory is imported after, it must be at least 100 years old.

Yet tons of illegal ivory still are sold because dealers claim the ivory was taken before the ban and there has been no test to prove them wrong - until now.
"With an accurate age of the ivory, we can verify if the trade is legal or not" when the age is combined with existing DNA analysis to determine if an elephant is from Africa or Asia, says Uno.
"Currently 30,000 elephants a year are slaughtered for their tusks, so there is a desperate need to enforce the international trade ban and reduce demand," said Uno.
Only 423,000 African elephants are left. Conservation groups say 70 per cent of smuggled ivory goes to China. The US is the next biggest illegal market.