How DNA testing could bring down the biggest criminals in the ivory trade | Smart News

Behind each piece of ivory, there is the death of an elephant. Each year, nearly 40,000 African elephant lives are lost to poaching, with some areas reporting a decline of more than 60% of their elephant populations in a single decade. Today, in an article published in the journal Progress of science, Scientists used genetic testing to challenge three of Africa's largest export trafficking cartels during the peak of the ivory trade between 2011 and 2014.

Poaching tends to be concentrated in regional hot spots on the African continent. Lead author of the study, Samuel Wasser, director of the Center for Biological Conservation at the University of Washington, says environmental advocates have been able to locate a handful of areas responsible for what he calls the "lion's share" of Africa's ivory. the last decade. But defining their sites on these targets is not enough. Ivory is almost always shipped from a country different from that in which it was poached, and there are no breadcrumbs coming out of the ports of exit.

In addition, poachers and traffickers tend to be elusive. They exercise an advantage on the ground in the areas where they hunt and are rarely pursued even when they are apprehended. Even beliefs, when they occur, do not always hold. Last month, a Kenyan court overturned a decision that had previously sentenced the large-scale ivory smuggler, Feisal Mohamed Ali, to 20 years in prison. The original conviction, handed down only two years ago, had linked Ali to a $ 4.2 million ivory cache in a Mombasa warehouse, an isolated event representing only a fraction of his reputation. of. "

"Wildlife is very precious and yet so few wildlife cases are prosecuted as they are not a top priority for law enforcement," Wasser told a news conference of the American Association. for the advancement of science.

Once ivory leaves Africa, it becomes increasingly difficult to trace, placing an undue burden on law enforcement agencies that monitor local smugglers. Thus, Wasser and his colleagues focused their efforts on linking individual shipments to export cartels by consolidating defenses, hoping to map the illegal trade network within African borders before the loss of ivory through dispersal. World. By analyzing the DNA of 38 large ivory seizures conducted between 2006 and 2015, the team determined that 26 samples from separate seizures corresponded to defenses from another shipment. The new research builds on Wasser's earlier work, published in 2015, to develop genetic tools for determining the origins of ivory.

"Originally, people thought that they had to have skin or blood on ivory [to get DNA]Explains Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell, co-founder of Utopia Scientific and a curator at Stanford University, who was not affiliated with this work. "But this technique does not even need that. This made the process simpler and more accessible. "

In most of these shipments, the individual defenses had been separated from their pairs, but still tended to leave the same port in the same calendar year. And the tusks that shared a container often came from the same approximate geographical location. This told the Wasser team that there were only a few powerful and well-connected cartels that were probably operating in Mombasa, Kenya; Entebbe, Uganda; and Lome, Togo, were the main drivers of the ivory trade in Africa. In addition, genetic evidence of the interdependence of the illegal trade network could imply more resellers known as Ali, who, according to Wasser, appears to be linked to several other seizures of the last decade.

In the future, DNA testing could help enforcement teams to double the rate of trafficking, not only in ports, but also in the chain, as cartels have started to equip their poachers . To that end, Wasser and his team work with government agencies both in Africa and abroad – including the US Department of Homeland Security – and strive to increase the participation of countries around the world that remain vulnerable wildlife trafficking.

"Until now, this has been a cakewalk for [cartels]Says O'Connell-Rodwell. "This [technology] sends them a new message: law enforcement has a lot more intelligence and can make contraband much more difficult.

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