Seeking to nab the traffickers of endangered pangolins
Pangolins, a scaly ant-eating animal with long claws and an ever longer snout, are among the world’s strangest mammals. They are also among its most trafficked animals, being driven inexorably ever closer to extinction by unscrupulous poachers and wildlife trafficking syndicates throughout their ranges in Africa and Asia.
Over the past decade around one million pangolins have been seized from the wild, making all eight subspecies of the mammals critically endangered. Some 300 pangolins are poached every single day.
Each year some 20 tons of pangolins and pangolin parts, especially their meat and scales are trafficked internationally throughout dozens of smuggling routes, according to a report by the wildlife smuggling watchdog TRAFFIC. The animals’ meat is highly prized in countries like China as an exotic delicacy while their scales (which are made of the same keratin that forms our nails) are widely used in traditional Chinese medicine.
Recently, in the Chinese city of Shenzen alone a staggering 11.9 tons of scales were recently seized from a ship. For that one shipment alone somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 pangolins had been butchered. Yet pangolin smuggling is good business so the animals continue to be slaughtered. In China pangolin scales sell for as much as $750 a kilo, making the illegal trade in them highly lucrative for smuggling syndicates.
Internationally at least 120 tons of pangolins and their parts were confiscated in just five years between 2010 and 2015 by law enforcement agencies. A similarly vast amount of pangolins is also likely to have been smuggled undetected during the same period. “Pangolins are a smuggler’s dream,” notes The Economist. “For defence, and when asleep, they roll themselves up into spheres, scales on the outside, to thwart any predator. That makes them easy to handle and pack. And handled and packed they have been, in enormous numbers.”
According to a paper published last year in Conservation Letters, anywhere between 400,000 and 2.7 million pangolins are poached each year in Central Africa alone. “Based on statistics such as these it seems likely that pangolins, of which there are eight species, four African and four Asian, are the most trafficked type of animal in the world,” The Economist adds.
In Africa, where four of the eight species of pangolin live, the situation of the animals continues to be very bleak. “In 2015 two tonnes of scales were found in a raid conducted at Entebbe airport in Uganda,” the magazine writes. Yet local efforts to stamp out poaching and trafficking are often stymied by ignorance, corruption and poverty.
“Cracking down on poachers and traders is difficult, particularly in poor places,” the magazine elucidates. “Even when governments are willing, conservation agencies often lack the resources, such as vehicles (and, indeed, the fuel to put in them) needed to patrol forests and investigate trafficking networks. And willingness is not always there,” it adds. “Such antipoaching and antitrafficking laws as do exist frequently go unenforced.”
It seems the outrages against these shy and reclusive mammals will never end. Or will it?
A team of researchers at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom has come up with a method to identify the people who have handled the trafficked scales of poached pangolins via their fingerprints. The researchers can identify suspected poachers and traffickers by applying gelatin lifters to the scales of individual animals.
These lifters are small sheets with the type of adhesive commonly used in forensics to collect fingerprints from crime scenes and can capture fingerprints from the scales as well. By identifying culprits, investigators would be better able to nab poachers and traffickers.
Better yet: they are simple and easy to use without the need for more complicated fingerprinting kits that use powder, brushes, and tape. This means that any wildlife ranger can employ this simple new forensic tool. During trials nearly 90% of the lifts yielded recognizable images of fingerprints from pangolin scales, and wildlife rangers in Cameroon and Kenya are now testing the fingerprint lifts in the field.
“This is a significant breakthrough for wildlife crime investigation,” Dr. Nicholas Pamment, who runs the Wildlife Crime Unit at the University of Portsmouth, notes. “What we have done is to create a quick, easy and usable method for wildlife crime investigation in the field to help protect these critically endangered mammals,” Pamment adds. “It is another tool that we can use to combat the poaching and trafficking of wild animals.”
Conservationists are hoping the new tool will help combat the illegal trade in critically endangered pangolins by enabling law enforcement officials to identify poachers and traffickers more effectively. “This new development is a promising tool for combating the illegal trade in pangolins,” Paul Thomson, co-founder of the conservationist nonprofit Save Pangolins, told National Geographic. “We need to see advanced techniques like this applied to every step in the chain of wildlife crime.”
