Joining Forces to Address the Threat of Wildlife Trafficking – Podcast Transcript Announcer: You are listening to Science at AMNH, the podcast of the American Museum of Natural History. Some animals may be too popular for their own good, whether it's doe-eyed slow lorises, nocturnal primates often sold as pets, or pangolins, prized for meat or medicine. Despite increased enforcement, profitable market continues to threaten these, and other, endangered species. Museum conservation biologist Mary Blair who is working with colleagues to understand the dynamics of illegal wildlife trade, suggest that biologists need to team up with economists and anthropologists to better understand and address wildlife trafficking. Interviewer: Mary, thank you so much for sitting down with us today. You just published a paper with a Vietnamese colleague on illegal wildlife trade in Southeast Asia. What is the scope of this issue, how big of a problem is this? Mary Blair (Director, Biodiversity Informatics Research Affiliated Professor, Richard Gilder Graduate School): It's a very big problem. I also want to point out the Vietnamese colleague—he's also a research associate here at the museum in herpetology. So, he's also part of the museum community. This is Minh Le. So, wildlife trade, it is the third most profitable illicit industry in the world, behind the drugs and weapons trade. And it's a major problem. It's a problem for wildlife. It's causing extinctions of species. It's also a problem for people. It threatens global security, health, livelihoods, etc. So, it's a big problem. Interviewer: In your paper you argue that we need a multi-disciplinary approach to this problem–biological, anthropological and economic. What does that mean and how does that work? Blair: That's a good question. So, the reason why we need interdisciplinary approach, as we call it—putting different kinds of knowledge together—is that if we don't, we risk missing information that we might need to understand the complexity of what's going on. So, wildlife trade is, we argue, a complex system. It's something where you need to understand the whole of what's going on before you try to understand the different parts. And that more holistic understanding is going to help us find better ways to address what's going on, and ways that are more site-specific or specific to particular places, cultures, governance, frameworks, etc. And you can imagine how biology enough, although biology's very important, it's not enough on its own to figure out the entire system of what's going on. What's missing is an understanding of people's behavior, of governance structures, of legal frameworks and of people's relationship to wildlife; how practices might relate to identities and understandings and worldviews. And these are all really important things. And if, instead of doing that, we took a cookie cutter of what works in another country and tried to make it work in a different country, it might fail. So, that's why we need it. How you go about it is a challenging thing. So, in our paper we present a framework to help researchers use different disciplines together to understand complexity and wildlife trade as a complex system. And we did it by bringing together a team of researchers with different kinds of expertise. So, Minh and I were the lead authors. We are conservation biologists, with an evolutionary bent. So, we're evolutionary biologists. We brought on to the team an economist, who really challenged the questions that we were asking and helped us think about our questions in new ways. We also brought on an anthropologist, who further questioned us. In particular, I think he was most valuable to help us think about basic assumptions that natural scientists tend to make about transferability and scalability of our results. Now, by that I mean if you find a relationship in one place, can you then take that relationship and apply it somewhere else? Or can you then take that relationship and apply it to the global scale or to a different scale? And natural scientists have a tendency to think we can do that and not really worry about it. But especially sociocultural anthropologists would shy away from that. And that interaction—just talking to each other and questioning our basic assumptions that come from different disciplines—really helped us to figure out the research question we should ask, how we should go about answering it, and how to characterize the complexity and nuance of wildlife trade as a system. Interviewer: Can you give an example of how this multi-disciplinary approach works in practice? Blair: So, for example, I can go through, for example, how we might change our hypothesis by bouncing around from discipline to discipline. So, we've now articulated this framework for slow loris trade in Vietnam. So, we have another paper coming out next week in the American Journal of Primatology that talks in more detail about slow loris trade in particular and how we've applied this framework. So, from there we first applied genetics to this problem. So, we used the museum's collections, the collections from other museums and samples collected in Vietnam, to create a reference database for all the genetic lineages of slow lorises in Vietnam. Then, we could take genetic samples from confiscated animals that the police would send to my colleague Minh's lab in Hanoi. We could figure out where they came from. And from that, we inferred a spatial pattern of trade, and we were able to show that several confiscated samples from the north originated from the south. So, that suggests a hypothesis of there's a flow of trade from south to north, and then maybe it's going out to China or other countries from the north. This is consistent with what other people have found for other species as well. So, that might be our working hypothesis. Then we did a bunch of interviews with people all over Vietnam, from the south to the north. We interviewed more than 100 people, a lot of whom work directly in trade. And we found out that we were wrong. That there's actually a lot of trade going from central Vietnam to the south, and then out to other places from there. And why didn't we pick that up in the genetic data? Well, the genetic lineage that we were able to characterize for southern slow lorises, it's actually the same in central Vietnam and south Vietnam. So, the genes we're using don't have enough variation to tell those populations apart, or our sample size isn't big enough. Maybe with a bigger sample size we would find a different result, but maybe not. And if we acted on the genetic information we had on its own, we would have missed this entirely other pattern of trade that was going on. So, that's one way—just in the operational playing out of this study that the disciplines gave us different information, and we were forced to put them together and understand what's going on. Interviewer: Since there is no one-size-fits-all approach to wildlife trade worldwide, as you were saying, how do you go about writing this paper and coming up with this framework that actually is applicable to scientists around the world? Blair: So, that's a really great question. So, the framework is less about prescribing different approaches to addressing trade. It's more about the process by which we understand trade. So, it's about improving the process of characterizing what's going on, so that we can make site-specific and situation-specific recommendations. So, the framework is about how researchers and scientists can address the complexity of this issue in a meaningful way, instead of shying away from it. It's very tempting because this is immediate crisis issue. So, we're tempted to act and do something now. And, yeah, it's complex, but we have to do something now, so let's do it, do it, do it. Right? But we don't need to shy away from the complexity. We can work with each other, take a little bit of extra time—not too much—and the framework can help with that and understand what's going on in a more holistic way. This is important because fixes that fail are a major issue. I want to point out our framework is built on an existing framework that was developed by a Nobel Prize-winning scientist Elinor Ostrom. So, she developed the social ecological systems framework, and this framework was groundbreaking. And she—exactly for the same reasons that we are talking about. Her framework was groundbreaking because she recognized that—I want to say this is a different way. I just lost my train of thought. Her framework was groundbreaking because for similar reason that we're talking about. She's saying we don't need to shy away from the complexity of social ecological systems. We can work together and try to characterize them and understand what variables we can measure from different disciplines to think about these systems and how people are managing and having relationships with natural resources. And she came to it from a framework of a background in governance and institutional analysis, which is really great. So, to date, social ecological systems frameworks are more common in the social sciences. So, in addition to our suggesting that these frameworks can be very helpful for wildlife trade as complex systems, we're also talking about how biologists can be using these frameworks more and adding more ecology and biology to the frameworks. Interviewer: Your work focuses heavily on lorises. What drew you to them? Blair: That's a good question. Slow lorises. Interviewer: Oh, slow lorises. Blair: I want to point out. There are slender lorises and there are slow lorises. There are also galagos, pottos, a lot of other awesome, nocturnal strepsirrhines, for the primate nerds who are listening. So, why is it the lorises? Good question. I started off in my research career studying squirrel monkeys in Costa Rica, which are diurnal, so they're around in the day. They're in huge groups. They're really loud. It's easy to find them. They sort of crash through the forest. By contrast, slow lorises are pretty quiet. They're active at night. They're nocturnal. They're usually alone most of the time—not always. And it's really hard to find them. And if you're lucky, you'll see maybe one in a night if you're lucky. They're at low densities. They're few and far between. So, it was a real 180 for me in terms of research focus. And the reason that I started developing research on them was because of the museum's long-term partnership with Vietnam. The museum's been working in Vietnam since 1995, when the country first opened up to U.S. researchers and scientists for collaboration. And we had an amazing cross-disciplinary research program where museum scientists were coming over and training and working with Vietnamese scientists to characterize the biodiversity of Vietnam. They did multitaxon biotic inventories, so making lists and inventories of the species of a particular area to help inform conservation efforts and support protected areas. And those relationships have only grown over time. So, some of the folks that were trained in those early years are my colleagues now. So, they're the Vietnamese scientists that I'm working with and writing papers with. And when I came to the museum after my PhD, which was in 2011, the director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, where I work, she asked me to look to develop projects in Vietnam based on my expertise, which is in primatology, genetics and spatially-explicit modeling. And she said talk with our colleagues, talk with experts in Vietnam and around and see where are the knowledge gaps. Where do we need to learn more? And the slow lorises came out very easily as something that we know is endangered. They keep showing up in illicit markets in wildlife trade. We know they're endangered, but we don't know very much about how many are left, how many species there are, where are they. So, just basic understanding of the conservation status and biology of the group, especially in Vietnam, was needed. And, importantly, there's been a minor surge or uptick in interest in slow lorises because of the leadership of Dr. Anna Nekaris, who leads the Little Fireface Project out of Oxford Brookes University. She has the only long-term ecological research cite on slow lorises and on the island of Java. And she's been training a lot of young folks and doing a lot more outreach about slow lorises. Every time she looks to characterize how many species there are of slow loris in a place, she finds more species. So, reading her work and getting to know her was also inspirational to me. And thinking that if we look, we're probably going to find more diversity than is currently recognized. And she's been very supportive, and I'm grateful to her. The same is true for a lot of other primate species and vertebrates in Vietnam. Vietnam's a very long country, from north to south. It has more of a subtropical climate in the north and a tropical climate in the south. And there's usually different species in the north central and south. But for the slow lorises, there are two species distributed in Vietnam, and they're just considered to be the same from north to south. So, in particular we were wondering if there might be more diversity than we thought there. So, that's why we originally got into it. But quickly it became clear that wildlife trade was the biggest threat to these animals. And our studies focusing on evolutionary biology and conservation biology could contribute to that, but weren't going to give us an understanding of what's going on with the wildlife trade. So, I worked to raise funds to do a more interdisciplinary project and bring together economists and anthropologists along with us as conservation biologists. And that's how this paper came to be. Interviewer: Why do slow lorises come up in the wildlife trade so often? Blair: That's a great question. It's a huge diversity of reasons. So, if you're at all familiar with YouTube, you're probably most familiar with them in the context of exotic pets. So, unfortunately, they are traded as pets at an international scale, especially in Russia and in Japan. They're kept as exotic pets. They're also used as photo props, so on beaches. You might see someone walking around with a loris and as a tourist you can take a photo with them. So, that's the photo prop trade. They're also quite common in that in an international scale. And that's a major problem. It's a major source of demand, and it's probably where the prices are highest. But there's also a lot going on at local scales. So, slow lorises are used by humans for meat, for different kinds of medicines and for other reasons. And we found that it is extremely variable from place to place. And people also have different relationships with lorises. They have different folk tales about them in different places and different memories about them in different places. So, at a local scale, it's just so diverse what's going on and how people are using them. And that nuance is not captured currently in the way that wildlife trade is managed and how conservation efforts are proceeding. So, for example, slow lorises are poisonous. They're the only poisonous primates. Now, yes, we could argue about what is poisonous, what is toxic, what is venomous, etc. This is what happens, they have a brachial gland—so, this is a gland right in the inside of their elbow—that secretes a clear liquid that is chemically very similar to histamine. Everybody knows what an antihistamine is. I am allergic to cats, so when I'm around a cat I take an antihistamine. If you're allergic to cats, you're probably allergic to lorises. So, what happens is this is secreted, and they lick it and they lick it all over themselves and it mixes with their saliva. And they have a very strong bite and big canines. And when they bite you, you can go into anaphylactic shock. And, in fact, it has happened many times. And people remember this. So, in some places where we were, we would talk to people about slow lorises and they said, "Oh, yeah. I saw one one time when I was in the forest looking for bamboo shoots or something else. I saw one. I thought about taking it because I knew I could get money for it, but I remembered this guy who went to the hospital last year for anaphylactic shock because a loris bit him. So, I decided not to do it." And that kind of nuanced information can really help with how we go about thinking of people's behavior and what drives their decisions and how we can start a conversation about changing behavior in some cases. We would call that in ethnography, which is an approach in anthropology—you would call that a diagnostic event that changes someone's behavior. And we found—this is actually coming out in another paper that's being written that'll come out probably in a few months from now. But it's been accepted, so I feel comfortable talking about it. It's a paper that's specific to the ethnographic approach that we took with the anthropologists on this project. And it's being published as a part of a special issue on the use of ethnography in studying human primate interactions. So, I'm excited about that special issue coming out soon. Interviewer: What led you to this idea of needing a multidisciplinary approach to conservation biology? Blair: Here at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the museum this is a part of our strategy. It's a part of our research strategy. So, being here I couldn't help but think about a multidisciplinary approach. Our tagline—what we like to say we do—is that we transform knowledge from diverse sources and perspectives into conservation action. And we do that not only because we learn more and we get to understand the complexity of a system by doing so, but also because it's the right thing to do. When we have more diversity of perspectives, we have more buy-in from people. We have more participation from different kinds of people in the kinds of work that we're doing. And thus, our research and the impact that our research has might resonate better with more of a diversity of people. Interviewer: So DNA collection is an essential component of the work you do, tell us a little about how you go about collecting those DNA samples. I understand scat, or loris poop, can actually be a really valuable resource to scientists. Blair: Actually, the thing is they don't poop that much. So, it's rather frustrating actually. Because when I studied squirrel monkeys, they are just pooping all the time. They have the highest metabolic rate for their body size of any primate. So, they're just pooping constantly, so I just had so many samples in my dissertation. Slow lorises have a really slow metabolic rate. Maybe they poop once a day, and it's in the dark. So, it's really hard to find it. So, actually we're often using hair more often than poop sadly. Because you can get a lot more information out of poop. You can find out what they're eating, their gut microbiome, parasites, all kinds of cool stuff. Interviewer: I understand that you and your team work with the US Fish and Wildlife service to identify species that are confiscated at airports, can you talk a little about that? Blair: Yeah. Great question. So, the museum has a long-running relationship with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. So, George Amato, who's a co-author on this paper and a colleague and a mentor, he has been working with them for a long time on ivory, on big cats, on a lot of other things, identifying samples and specimens as they come in through airports. He's also testified in court. He won an award actually from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation for his service on these issues last year. So, we're all very proud of George. Yeah, so through George we got in touch with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services forensic laboratory. And they were able to identify these specimens as slow lorises, but they couldn't tell what species because it was just part of the skin. And we were able to use our reference database, built on the museum's collections, to figure out exactly what species and approximately where it came from. So, that's really helpful to them, again, to think about spatial patterns. And it was helpful for us because that was when we could really verify that our approach was working. And museums are invaluable for these kinds of things. One of the reasons why George is called upon so much is because the prosecution of these cases requires a chain of evidence to be preserve. And because our collection is vouchered specimens, and there's really strong regulation and understanding of where the species came from and we have a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork around who gets to use the collections and who has access to them. We are able to use our specimens as vouchered specimens for these cases. So, we have an interesting and, I think, helpful relationship with them. Interviewer: So there are agents stationed at airports specifically to identify wildlife trafficking? Blair: Yeah. I mean, and there are—I mean, there are international laws about this. So, the convention on international trade and endangered species has a lists of species where international trade is prohibited. And as scientists when we carry samples across borders, we need to have permits for those samples. And often we're checking in with these agents to let them know that we are doing this with appropriate permissions. I don't know if you've ever traveled through Tokyo—have you? No. I'm there a lot on my way to Vietnam. And they have a display about illegal wildlife trade and things that they have confiscated at the Tokyo airport. And I think—yeah, at JFK there's always somebody there. Interviewer: With all of this in mind, and given all of your research and field work, how optimistic are you that we can put a stop to wildlife trafficking? Blair: I'm actually going to share some thoughts from the people that we interviewed in Vietnam because I have my feelings, but I think what they said was really powerful and has really influenced my feelings. So, we heard from a lot of folks that they hope their sons and daughters don't hunt in the forests like they do. It's interesting because some of the older folks we talked to would say, no, of course, people are going to continue to hunt and engage in this trade because it's part of our identity. It's who we are. And I can understand that. I have family that hunt deer here, for example. You know what I mean? So, it's part of the culture and identity. I understand that. But the younger folks that we talked to—so, folks in their 30s and 40s would say it's taking me longer and longer each time I go to find anything. Our forests are becoming empty, so I don't want my sons and daughters doing this. I hope that they get an education and have a better life, not only because there might not be anything left for them to hunt, but also because they're hoping for a more stable livelihood for them. Not everybody said that, though, but I think people are thinking about the future. And people are seeing things as they happen. And I really hope that empowering local communities through their livelihoods, and better livelihoods and livelihoods that resonate with them in their wellbeing, will have an effect here. Because with the slow lorises it's really this international, large-scale, high-priced trade that's creating a lot of the pressure. And it's more underground, elite demand markets, and folks that are more living in the forest and trying to create their livelihoods from gathering in the forest, they're losing out in every way. I hope that more empowerment and working with them will result in betterment of these issues. Interviewer: Are there things that people, as non-scientists, can do to be a part of the solution to the wildlife trade? Blair: There are a lot of small things you can do. So, if you see a friend sharing a YouTube video of a loris as an exotic pet—a slow loris as an exotic pet or a slender loris—take it as a learning moment to let them know that this is not okay. This is a wild animal. In addition, if you're traveling somewhere and you see an animal being used as a photo prop—it might be a slow loris, it might be another kind of primate or other animal—don't engage. And there are also ways to report that activity. There are apps like—the Freeland Foundation has an app, for example, to help report those activities to the appropriate authorities. So, there are things you can do as you're traveling or as you're engaging in social media to help spread the word and educate about these issues. Interviewer: Well, thank you so much. Blair: Yeah, it's my pleasure. Announcer: Thanks for listening to Science at AMNH. If you liked this episode, subscribe to Science at AMNH. To help other listeners find us, please rate and review us on iTunes, SoundCloud or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to our archive of podcasts, please visit amnh.org/podcasts.