New tool in fight against lion poaching

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A team of researchers at the University of Illinois have developed groundbreaking software to give the fight against lion poaching “teeth”. 

Called Lion Localizer, the interactive software examines the geographic origin of lions and trafficked lion products, based on mitochondrial DNA sequences. 

The software, which is publicly and freely available, uses a database of mitochondrial DNA sequences obtained from published studies to gain insight into the possible origins of confiscated lion body parts. 

Africa’s iconic big cats are facing a catastrophic decline. Its lion population has nearly halved in the past 25 years, because of threats such as the illegal wildlife trade, bushmeat poaching, habitat loss and fragmentation and human-lion conflict. Only an estimated 20 000 lions remain. Lions are listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature on the Red List of Threatened Species.

“Smuggled wildlife products may be moved far from their original geographic source, and may be consolidated or travel across various countries, before being confiscated by authorities in a transit or destination country,” said Dr Alfred Roca, a professor in the department of animal sciences at the University of Illinois, who heads up the project.

“With lions increasingly subject to poaching for their teeth, claws, and other bones, we wanted to develop software and databases to allow law enforcement and forensics laboratories the capacity to examine the geographic source of the lions using DNA.” 

Developing the software

Roca said there are many DNA sequences available for lions from across Africa, published in scientific journals. “At the same time, lions are increasingly being illegally trafficked for their parts. Thus it made sense to develop software that could be used by those fighting the illegal trade in lions.” 

Labs, he said, can sequence the DNA of any confiscated lion products, and use it as a query on the Lion Localizer, which will provide them with a map and listing of the locations in Africa from which the same or similar DNA sequences have been reported.

“A laboratory with access to a confiscated lion product would extract DNA from the samples, then enter the DNA sequence into the Lion Localizer. The Lion Localizer would search against its curated database of geographically referenced lion DNA and produce a list and map of all of the places in Africa from which identical or similar sequences have been reported. 

“This would save them a lot of time and effort because they would not have to find original papers nor to verify that any listing they could come up with would be comprehensive. They would not need to recapitulate the process that led to development and testing of the Lion Localizer.”

The knowledge gleaned from the software will help in the ongoing fight against wildlife crime, by suggesting that lions may be from a particular region in Africa, and by excluding the likelihood that the lions came from other regions, providing law enforcement with information helpful towards further investigation. The software can also provide insight into which lion populations have either been recently targeted, or are being repeatedly targeted, by poachers, allowing for mitigation measures to be implemented. 

Translating academic work into practice

Its development was supported by a grant from USAid’s VukaNow, a multi-faceted, five-year regional project operating in Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe, to significantly reduce wildlife crime in southern Africa.

Christopher Gegenheimer, of VukaNow described the Lion Localizer as an “innovative step forward” that is translating academic work to “on-the-ground” efforts to combat wildlife crime. “Through this, and other grants, USAid’s VukaNow Activity serves as that bridge to move things from theory to practice,” he said.

VukaNow chief of party Deborah Kahatano added that the Lion Localizer will support the Southern African Development Community in implementing its Law Enforcement and Anti-Poaching (Leap) strategy, by furthering the Leap objective of minimising wildlife crimes and illegal trade.

While the software currently uses information from a fragment of DNA, as additional DNA sequences and markers become available for lions, it should be possible to further increase the accuracy and precision of the estimates of the geographic origin of lion products. 

Similar software is available for elephants — the Loxodonta Localizer. Roca said it would be feasible, too, to develop similar software and similar verified databases for other species of trafficked wildlife for which DNA sequences could provide insights into the geographic origins of confiscated samples. 

Research by Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organisation, has documented how the targeted poaching for body parts — teeth and claws — has become a further emerging threat to lion conservation. 

In May last year, Forestry, Fisheries and Environment Minister Barbara Creecy announced that South Africa will no longer breed captive lions, keep lions in captivity or use captive lions or their derivatives commercially, noting the risks that the trade in lion parts poses to stimulating poaching and illegal trade.