BY NOKUTHABA DLAMINI
A top university in the United States of America is working on potentially ground-breaking software to fight help end the poaching of lions and trafficking of their body parts.
The University of Illinois says the software will track lion populations and trafficked lion products, based on mitochondrial DNA sequences, which has the potential to identify regions where poaching of the big cats.
VukaNow Activity, a USAid sponsored initiative to combat wildlife crime, in a statement to mark World Lion Day on August 10, said it was supporting the university’s efforts to develop the “Lion Localizer” given that Africa’s population is under threat.
Zimbabwe is one of the countries where lions are poached for their parts and skin.
“Africa’s lion population has almost halved in the past 25 years, due to threats such as illegal wildlife trade, bush meat poaching, habitat loss and fragmentation, and human-lion conflict, this technology is a timely addition to the fight against this decline,” VukaNow Activity said.
Alfred Roca, a professor in the department of animal sciences at the University of Illinois, and is heading up the innovative project, said the software will help law enforcement agencies to tackle the poaching menace.
“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,” Roca sai.
“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.”
According to Wesley Au, a graduate student working on the project, the Lion Localizer is interactive software that utilises a database of mitochondrial DNA sequences obtained from published studies, in order to gain insight on the possible origins of confiscated lion body parts.
“A mitochondrial DNA sequence, which may easily be produced using DNA extracted from lion tissue samples, is used as a query for the software,” Au said.
“The software creates a list of all the locations in Africa from which lions have been reported to have a particular DNA sequence, and plots these locations on a map of Africa.
“This makes it possible to identify regions from which the lions could potentially have been poached.”
VukaNow Activity said the knowledge will assist in the on-going 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.
“This will provide law enforcement with information helpful towards further investigation,” it added.
“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.
“Importantly, law enforcement forensics laboratories will be able to gather this information, using the Lion Localizer, without the need for species-specific expertise or a great investment in time and limited resources.”
Deborah Kahatano, the chief of party for USAID’s VukaNow Activity, said they were thrilled to have been able to support the development of such software through a grant, as it was closely aligned with the objectives of their initiative.
“The software will act as an essential addition to the tools we have available to combat wildlife crime in the region,”Kahatano said.
” In addition, it 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.”
VukaNow Activity said 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 increase the accuracy and preciseness of the estimates of the geographic origin of lion products.
Roca also noted that going forward, the software and methods developed could potentially also be applied to other trafficked species for which geographically-referenced DNA sequences are available.