The forensic scientists who read ivory like a map — and what they found about Kenya's poaching networks
WRTI's genetics laboratory has analysed the DNA of more than 2,800 ivory pieces seized by Kenyan authorities since 2016. The findings — published quietly in scientific journals — contain a detailed map of organised poaching networks that no law enforcement database can match.
The sample arrives at WRTI's genetics laboratory in a sealed evidence bag. It might be a fragment of carved ivory the size of a thumb, or a single elephant hair retrieved from a wire snare. Inside is DNA — and DNA, if you know how to read it, is a geographic record that tells you precisely where in Africa that animal was born.
The process is called population assignment, and WRTI's genetics team has been refining it for 11 years. The principle is simple: individual elephants carry genetic markers that are characteristic of the population they were born into. Those markers — microsatellite profiles extracted from ivory, hair, skin, or dung — can be matched against a reference database of known individuals from known locations. If you know where the genetic profile matches, you know where the animal came from.
WRTI's database currently contains reference profiles from 6,843 individual elephants, sampled from field sites across Kenya over two decades. When ivory arrives at the laboratory, it is compared against this database — and in 94% of cases analysed since 2016, a population of origin has been successfully assigned, often to within a specific ecosystem zone.