“The Gathering” in Sri Lanka’s Minneriya National Park is said to be among the world’s most spectacular wildlife phenomena. Every year, hundreds of elephants gather on a dry lakebed in the park that becomes fertile grazing land during the months of June through August.
Tuskers, or male elephants with prominent tusks, are one of the main attractions for visitors during this event, but conservationists are now concerned these bulls are quickly disappearing, Mongabay contributor Malaka Rodrigo reported in March 2025.
Three of the region’s most iconic tuskers have died or been injured in recent years. This includes a single-tusked bull elephant named Unicorn, who was a “true king,” Rodrigo writes, often spotted alongside female elephants during the gathering. But Unicorn was found dead on March 17 after being shot by unidentified individuals.
A young tusker called Koliya was also shot last year and his decomposed body was found in December 2024. He usually accompanied a long-tusked bull elephant named Sumedha. But Sumedha, too, was injured recently after a speeding truck hit him, causing one of his tusks to break.
“It was one of the largest tusks I have ever seen,” Hasintha Sooriyaarachchi, a safari jeep operator who photographed the roughly 1.5-meter-long (5-foot) broken tusk, told Rodrigo. Despite attempts by wildlife authorities to track him, Sumedha had not been spotted at the time of publishing.
“The big tuskers of Sri Lanka are falling like dominoes,” veteran wildlife photographer Namal Kamalgoda told Mongabay. “We may be the last generation to witness these magnificent creatures in the wild.”
Back in 2020, wildlife photographer Rajiv Welikala had contributed a rare photo essay of Sri Lanka’s iconic tuskers for Mongabay. But he told Rodrigo that half of the tuskers he featured have already died.
“From a conservation perspective, a tusker is simply another male elephant, but they serve as powerful symbols — flagships for conservation,” Prithiviraj Fernando, an elephant biologist at Sri Lanka’s Centre for Conservation and Research, told Rodrigo.
The problem is even more concerning since fewer than 7% of male elephants in Sri Lanka have tusks, compared to 45% of bull elephants in North India and 95% in South India.
While some experts speculate that the low numbers of tuskers in Sri Lanka is a genetic anomaly, others say it’s due to human interference.
Tuskers are revered in Sri Lanka, and temples have historically valued them for various ceremonies. Fernando said historical records show that tuskers were often captured from the wild, resulting in them being removed from the gene pool. This, he said, has led to artificial selection for tuskless males.
“In essence, we have loved Sri Lanka’s tuskers to death,” Fernando told Mongabay.
Sri Lanka’s environmentalists are now calling for urgent conservation action to protect the country’s tuskers before all of them die out.
Read the full story here.
Banner image: “Unicorn” in Minneriya, Sri Lanka, courtesy of Namal Kamalgoda.
Correction: A line explaining what a “tusker” is was modified for accuracy.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
