Many species are on the verge of extinction due to poaching. Humans have used the skin or other body parts of these animals for a long time as they have significant value in the black market. One of these animals is the rhinoceros. While the rhinoceros is not yet extinct, its population has decreased rapidly in the last few years from poaching. However, recent research has found that another major change in rhinos has occurred due to them being hunted.
According to a report in The Guardian, rhino horns have gradually got shorter over time and it can mainly be attributed to hunting. Over the years, hunters have long gone after rhino horns, and today’s poachers sell them so that they can be used in Chinese and Vietnamese traditional remedies.
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Oscar Wilson, a PhD student and first author of the research at the University of Helsinki, is quoted by The Guardian as saying that hunters and poachers mostly go for rhinos with larger horns as they fetch them a higher price in the market.
Published in the journal People and Nature, the researchers said that due to the preference of hunting rhinos with large horns, it automatically resulted in the ones with smaller horns surviving more and reproducing more and passing on their genetic traits of smaller horns to the future generations.
A similar trend has been recorded for creatures such as elephants and wild sheep, the research says. In this research done by Wilson and his team, the horns of 80 rhinos were examined and their average size was estimated. According to him, the horns of the black and white rhino used to be the largest, while the horns of the Sumatran rhino were smaller. But this research showed that the size of the horns of all species of rhinoceros is now getting smaller.
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