In January 2019, a seizure of 3.3 tons of ivory in Uganda turned up something surprising: markings on some of the tusks suggested that they may have been taken from a stockpile of ivory kept, it was thought, strictly under lock and key by the government of Burundi.

A study co-authored by , a 91̽�� professor of biology and co-executive director of the , used carbon isotope science to show that the marked tusks were more than 30 years old and somehow had found their way from the guarded government stockpile into the hands of illegal ivory traders. The team, led by , a professor at the University of Utah, Oct. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their findings suggest that governments that maintain ivory stockpiles may want to take a closer look at their inventory.

Cerling, who is lead author on the new paper, is a pioneer in the use of isotopes to answer questions about physical and biological processes. Isotopes of a given element refer to atoms of the element that vary in their number of neutrons, and thus vary oh-so-slightly in mass. A carbon-14 isotope has one more neutron than carbon-13, for example.

Some isotopes are stable and some are unstable. Unstable isotopes decay into other isotopes or elements through radioactive decay. Since the rate of decay is known for unstable isotopes, scientists can use the amounts present in a sample to determine ages. That’s how carbon dating works — it uses the rate of decay of unstable carbon-14 to determine the age of organic matter.

Around a decade ago, Cerling attended a presentation by Wasser, who studies the genetics of wildlife and uses those tools to investigate the date and place of wildlife poaching. Cerling, recognizing that his expertise in isotope science might be able to add useful information, began an ongoing collaboration with Wasser.

In 2016, Cerling, Wasser and colleagues published that addressed a key question in the ivory trade: how old is the ivory seized by governments? Some traders have claimed their ivory is old, taken before 1976, and thus exempt from sales bans. And with the average size of ivory seizures more than 2.5 tons, researchers, governments and conservationists wonder how much of the ivory is recent and how much is coming from criminal stockpiles — or is stolen from one of several ivory stockpiles held by the governments of some countries in Africa.

“Governments keep their stockpiles for multiple reasons,” said Wasser. “They hope to sell the ivory for revenue, sometimes to support conservation efforts. However, they can only sell ivory from elephants that died of natural causes or were culled because they were problem animals. They can’t sell seized ivory because they don’t know it came from the country.”

With the combination of Cerling’s isotope data and Wasser’s genetic data, the 2016 study found that more than 90% of seized ivory was from elephants that had been killed less than three years before. It was a sobering result, showing active and well-developed poaching and export networks. Yet the study also seemed to indicate that little ivory from government stockpiles had ended up on the black market.

But the 2019 seizure of ivory in Uganda showed something concerning. Some of the tusks sported markings that looked suspiciously like the markings that CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, uses to inventory stockpiled ivory.

“Due to the markings seen on some samples of the ivory, it was thought that quite a few samples in this shipment could be related to material held in a government stockpile in Burundi,” said Cerling. “We were asked to date samples from this, and three other recent ivory seizures, to see if some samples could possibly be from older stockpiles.”

To determine the ivory’s age, the researchers collected small samples from the tusks and analyzed them for the amount of carbon-14 isotopes in each sample. They were looking specifically for the amount of “bomb carbon” in the tusks. Between 1945 and 1963, nuclear weapons testing doubled the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, so anything living that’s consumed carbon since then — including you — has a measurable carbon-14 signature. The amount of carbon-14 in a sample of ivory that hasn’t yet decayed can tell scientists when the ivory stopped growing, or when the elephant died.

The method takes some calibration, using samples from organisms living in the same area. Some of the samples came from schoolchildren in Kenya, through a program called “Kids and Goats for Elephants.” Since most families in rural Kenya keep goats, the program, run by Cerling and Paula Kahumbu of WildlifeDirect, engages children in collecting hair samples from goats for isotopic analysis. The isotope data is useful for many applications, including fighting elephant poaching and, in this case, calibrating the bomb carbon decay rate for more accurate dating of ivory.

The researchers analyzed ivory from four seizures in Angola, Hong Kong, Singapore and Uganda. Genetic data ensured that they weren’t sampling two tusks from the same individual. The results of analysis from the Angola, Hong Kong and Singapore seizures were as expected — the samples were mostly around three years after the death of the elephant, with no tusks having been taken more than 10 years ago.

But the Uganda seizure, with the inventory markings on the tusks, showed something very different. Nine of the 11 tusks tested had been taken more than 30 years before, with the dates of death ranging between 1985 and 1988. Those dates are consistent with the age of ivory in the stockpile of the government of Burundi, which was inventoried and stored in sealed containers in 1989.

“My suspicions were affirmed,” said Wasser. “The bigger surprise was how near to 1989 the elephants were killed.”

At the time Burundi assembled its stockpile, a condition of joining CITES, which assists governments in managing ivory reserves, was that the ivory to be stockpiled was old. The results suggest that that wasn’t the case, according to Wasser, which would have violated conditions for Burundi to join CITES.

“The hope is that CITES will request the stockpile to be re-inventoried, including aging randomly selected tusks, and secure the remaining stocks,” said Wasser.

For more information, contact Wasser at wassers@uw.edu and Cerling at thure.cerling@utah.edu.

Adapted from a by the University of Utah.

A team led by scientists at the 91̽�� and special agents with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has used genetic testing of ivory shipments seized by law enforcement to uncover the international criminal networks behind ivory trafficking out of Africa. The genetic connections across shipments that they’ve uncovered exposes an even higher degree of organization among ivory smuggling networks than previously known.

The , published Feb. 14 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, incorporates results from DNA testing of more than 4,000 African elephant tusks from 49 different ivory seizures made in 12 African nations over a 17-year period.

Exposing the connections among separate ivory seizures — made at African and Asian ports sometimes thousands of miles apart — will likely boost evidence against the criminals arrested for elephant poaching and ivory smuggling, and strengthen prosecutions of the responsible transnational criminal organizations, according to lead author Samuel Wasser, a 91̽��professor of biology and director of the , whose group developed the genetic tools behind this work.

“These methods are showing us that a handful of networks are behind a majority of smuggled ivory, and that the connections between these networks are deeper than even our previous research showed,” said Wasser.

Illegal ivory trade — along with habitat loss, climate change and other factors — has decimated the two elephant species in Africa. Although ivory seizures by authorities come from elephants that have already been slaughtered, the tusks can provide valuable information by illuminating the poaching, shipment activities and connectivity of traffickers.

Previous work by Wasser and his collaborators — published in 2018 in the journal Science Advances — identified tusks from the same elephant that were separated and smuggled in different shipments prior to being seized by law enforcement. Finding both tusks from the same individual linked those seizures to the same trafficking networks. Those efforts indicated that, from 2011 to 2014, cartels tended to smuggle ivory out of three African ports: Mombasa, Kenya; Entebbe, Uganda; and Lomé, Togo.

In this new endeavor, Wasser and his colleagues expanded their DNA analysis and testing regimen to also identify tusks of elephants that were close relatives — parents and offspring, full siblings and half-siblings. Adding close relatives expands the scope of the effort, Wasser said.

“If you’re trying to match one tusk to its pair, you have a low chance of a match. But identifying close relatives is going to be a much more common event, and can link more ivory seizures to the same smuggling networks,” said Wasser.

The team tested this expanded protocol on 4,320 tusks — from both forest elephants, Loxodonta cyclotis, and savannah elephants, Loxodonta africana — from 49 separate large shipments totaling 111 metric tons of ivory, all seized from 2002 to 2019. Results showed that a majority of these shipments could be linked based on matching tusks either from the same individual or from close relatives.

“Identifying close relatives indicates that poachers are likely going back to the same populations repeatedly — year after year — and tusks are then acquired and smuggled out of Africa on container ships by the same criminal network,” said Wasser. “This criminal strategy makes it much harder for authorities to track and seize these shipments because of the immense pressure they are under to move large volumes of containers quickly through ports,” said Wasser.

The genetic data show that a handful of interconnected smuggling networks are likely behind most large ivory shipments, most often exported from ports in Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria. By expanding the analysis to identify tusks from close relatives, the team could also link seizures from a dozen countries in Central and West Africa, stretching from Ivory Coast on the Atlantic Ocean to Mozambique on the Indian Ocean.

The larger analysis also can track how smuggling networks shifted their operations to different ports over time: from Tanzania in the early 2000s; then to Kenya and Uganda; and, most recently, to Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In West Africa, a temporal shift occurred from Togo to Nigeria.

“By linking individual seizures, we’re laying out whole smuggling networks that are trying to get these tusks off the continent,” said Wasser.

The criminals behind one ivory seizure would have been prosecuted solely for that seizure. But the genetic evidence by Wasser and his team could strengthen investigations and prosecutions by linking responsible transnational criminal organizations to multiple seizures — leading to more severe penalties.

Co-authors are Charles Wolock, a 91̽��doctoral student in biostatistics; John Brown III with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security; 91̽��biology research scientists Mary Kuhner, Yves Hoareau, Eunjin Jeon and Zofia Kaliszewska; Bruce Weir, a 91̽��professor of biostatistics; Kin-Lan Han, a former 91̽��researcher who is currently a geneticist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; Chris Morris with SeeJ-Africa in Nairobi, Kenya; Ryan Horwitz, who was at the University of Michigan and is now a 91̽��research scientist; Anna Wong and Charlene J. Fernandez with the National Parks Board of Singapore; and Moses Otiende with the Kenya Wildlife Service.

The research was funded by the Paul and Yaffe Maritz Family Foundation, the Wildlife Conservation Network, the Elephant Crisis Fund, the U.N. Development Program, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, the Woodtiger Fund, the Wildcat Foundation, the U.S. Department of State, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, HSI, the World Bank, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, the National Institute of Justice and the National Institutes of Health.

For more information, contact Wasser at wassers@uw.edu.

Across the globe, endangered species are at risk for illegal poaching. African elephants are sought out for their ivory, rhinoceros for their singular horns, and armadillo-like pangolins for their protective, brittle scales. Add to that list valuable and environmentally sensitive trees illegally harvested throughout the world where entire ecosystems are being deforested and illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing that is devastating oceans. These illicit markets, estimated at $1 trillion annually, cause enormous environmental impacts and have the potential to unleash new, deadly pathogens.

Now, a group of 91̽�� professors is leading an effort to combat these crimes. The UW’s is a unique interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers; state, federal and international law enforcement agencies; nongovernmental organizations; and the private sector that aims to disrupt and dismantle transnational organized environmental crimes.

“This important project epitomizes how 91̽��scientists are innovating across disciplines to contribute to the public good,” said 91̽��President Ana Mari Cauce. “Working to protect precious and endangered species and stop transnational criminals from trafficking in illegal goods will help to preserve our natural world in service of all humanity, including future generations.”

The center was established last fall with state funding and will be led by Samuel Wasser, a 91̽��professor in the Department of Biology, and John Hermanson, a 91̽��research scientist in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. It will replace and broaden the work of the 91̽��Center for Conservation Biology.

The team will deepen existing relationships that span the globe, working closely with law enforcement to develop cutting-edge tools and data-driven analysis that help competent authorities pinpoint transnational organized criminals and bring them to justice.

The group is comprised of nearly 40 additional scholars who span the UW’s expertise, including from the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, the School of Public Health, and the Burke Museum. Faculty from other universities are also participating. The governmental agencies involved include U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Forest Service International Programs, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Singapore National Parks, the Container Control Programme of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime and the World Customs Organization, and others.

“The combination of government and nongovernmental collaborators, including scientists and NGOs working on the ground, produces a highly experienced, complementary forum that draws upon long-standing histories working in source and transit countries and the associated trust that instills,” Wasser said. “This not only enables us to ask the right questions, but also provides unprecedented access to large seizures of environmental contraband, providing the raw material for follow-up investigation needed to answer those questions.”

Wasser pioneered genetic methods to identify elephant poaching hotspots across Africa, track the number and connectivity of major ivory traffickers operating in Africa and throughout the world, and uncover strategies that transnational organized crime syndicates use to acquire and move their contraband. One recent example of how the group collaborates with law enforcement was the November from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Hermanson has devised similar approaches to track illegally harvested timber. He led the development of the , a machine vision device that scans timber and can quickly and accurately identify species. Hermanson also co-developed , with the support of U.S. Forest Service International Programs, which is a trees-to-trade reference system that helps authorities identify illicit timber shipments by aggregating and vetting information on taxonomy, geographic origin, conservation and trade regulations.

“These transnational organized environmental crimes are getting more sophisticated, and competent authorities need cutting-edge tools to keep up. Thus, one focus of the center is to develop such technology-for-good tools,” Hermanson said.

The scientists’ combined work has led to prosecutions of major transnational criminal organizations and built relationships with a wide array of law enforcement, NGOs and other groups seeking to halt the illegal wildlife and timber trades and stem its impacts. Some of these criminal enterprises also are involved in narcotics and human trafficking schemes, and other illegal activity.

Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing is being addressed by the center through members from the 91̽��School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and others. IUU fishing jeopardizes fish stocks and associated ecosystems and has replaced piracy as the leading global maritime security threat.

Given the extent to which past pandemics, including COVID-19, have been triggered by unregulated wildlife consumption, the and members of the will monitor wildlife products for emerging zoonotic diseases.

“The center’s program is a force multiplier, ad almost infinitum,” said Washington state Sen. Jesse Salomon, D-Shoreline, who in 2021 helped secure $1 million in funding for the center from the state legislature. “Personally, I have a really hard time watching our magnificent wildlife — elephants, rhinoceros, old-growth trees — disappearing before our eyes.”

A new approach is necessary to combine multiple state-of-the-art tools aimed at uncovering connections between illegal wildlife shipments and to link multiple seizures to the transnational criminal organizations exporting them, Wasser said.

“This [hypothesis-driven approach] empowers law enforcement agencies to see the whole picture rather than focusing on single-crime prosecution, which rarely addresses the root of the problem,” Wasser said.

The center’s work is vital to port security, where thousands of huge shipping containers from around the world are both imported and exported, creating opportunities for both the trafficking and interdiction of illegal goods. Around 70% of all goods are sent by sea in shipping containers.

“These transnational criminal organizations are greatly capitalizing on this, because once they get their contraband in a container and through customs at the port of export, it gets concealed in the legal trade, making the contraband far more difficult and expensive to trace,” Wasser said.

Like other major ports, Seattle has struggled during the COVID pandemic with a backlog of cargo. The U.S. Coast Guard attempts to target suspicious containers, but customs officials are looking for the proverbial “needle in the haystack” when it comes to contraband, said Port of Seattle Commissioner Fred Felleman. The new center will help authorities expedite and pinpoint which containers need to be opened.

A team of dogs, part of the center’s long-running project, is being trained to rapidly screen numerous containers for contraband without having to open them. Air drawn from shipping container vents is passed through odor collection pads, which are then presented to detection dogs in a nearby location. Officials plan to pilot this method at the Port of Seattle in collaboration with Homeland Security Investigations and the Northwest Seaport Alliance. Felleman said it made sense to tap the expertise at the UW, and it also helps that the university — a respected, independent institution — will bring together a broad coalition of partners.

“The challenge with any bureaucracy, no less multiple bureaucracies, is having the left and right hand talking to each other,” Felleman said. “Having them all housed in one place at the 91̽��is a huge step in the right direction and could have multiplicative benefits.”

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For more information, contact Wasser at wassers@uw.edu or Hermanson at jhermans@uw.edu.

The international trade in elephant ivory has been illegal since 1989, yet African elephant numbers continue to decline. In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature cited ivory poaching as a primary reason for a staggering — leaving their total numbers at an estimated 415,000.

In a published Sept. 19 in the journal , an international team led by scientists at the 91̽�� reports that DNA test results of large ivory seizures made by law enforcement have linked multiple ivory shipments, over the three-year period when this trafficking reached its peak, to the same network of dealers operating out of a handful of African ports. The researchers linked these ivory shipments together after developing a rigorous sorting and DNA testing regimen for tusks in different ivory shipments. This method allowed the scientists to identify tusk pairs that had been separated and shipped in different consignments to different destinations around the world — yet had been shipped out of the same port, nearly always within 10 months of each other, with high overlap in the geographic origins of tusks in the matching shipments.

“ on DNA testing of illegal ivory shipments showed that the major elephant ‘poaching hotspots’ in Africa were relatively few in number,” said lead and corresponding author , director of the 91̽�� and a professor of biology. “Now, we’ve shown that the number and location of the major networks smuggling these large shipments of ivory out of Africa are also relatively few.”

Using this protocol, the team identified what appear to be the three largest ivory smuggling cartels in Africa, operating out of Mombasa, Kenya; Entebbe, Uganda; and Lomé, Togo. Out of 38 large ivory shipments analyzed, the team was able to link 11 of these shipments together by identifying tusk pairs that had been separated after poaching, yet shipped out of the same port during the 2011-2014 period when trafficking was at its peak.

Large shipments currently dominate the illegal ivory trade. About 70 percent of ivory seizures between 1996 and 2011 were in large consignments of at least half a metric ton, or about 0.55 U.S. tons, according to a 2013 in PLOS ONE. Linking multiple large ivory shipments to the same smuggling networks will help build evidence against the cartels that are responsible for the bulk of illegal ivory trade and shipment, Wasser said. These efforts could add multiple counts of trafficking charges against the leaders of smuggling operations, who most often are tried for single, high-profile and occasionally controversial events; the recent of Feisal Mohamed Ali in Kenya being a case in point.

“We reveal connections between what would otherwise be isolated ivory seizures — linking seizures not just to specific criminal networks operating in these ports, but to poaching and transport networks that funnel the tusks hundreds of miles to these cartels,” said Wasser. “It is an investigative tool to help officials track these networks and collect evidence for criminal cases.”

Wasser and his team had previously developed DNA testing of large ivory shipments to identify what populations of African elephants were most targeted by poachers. For this endeavor, they created a “genetic reference map” of elephant populations across Africa, using DNA samples extracted primarily from elephant dung. Then, the team sampled ivory from elephant tusks seized by law enforcement officials and extracted DNA from them. The researchers matched key regions in the ivory DNA samples to the genetic reference map, which let them identify the region that the elephant had come from, often to within about 300 kilometers, or about 186 miles. In a 2015 published in Science, they announced that the bulk of seized tusks came from on the continent based on these DNA analyses.

While conducting those analyses, Wasser and his team developed a protocol to representatively subsample hundreds of tusks as efficiently as possible.

“We have neither the time nor the money to collect samples and extract DNA from every tusk in a shipment,” said Wasser. “We needed to find a way to sample only a fraction of the tusks in a shipment, but that method also needed to let us get a glimpse at the diversity of poached elephants within that shipment.”

In each large ivory seizure, they would identify pairs by sorting tusks by the diameter of the base, color, and gum line, which indicates where the lip rested on the tusk. This allowed the researchers to extract DNA from only one tusk in the pair. Using this sorting approach, Wasser and his team noticed that many tusks in large shipments were orphans. The partner tusk was not present. But through comparing DNA samples from tusks among 38 large ivory consignments confiscated from 2011 to 2014, they matched up 26 pairs of tusks among 11 shipments, even though they were only testing, on average, about one-third of the tusks in each seizure.

“There is so much information in an ivory seizure — so much more than what a traditional investigation can uncover,” said Wasser. “Not only can we identify the geographic origins of the poached elephants and the number of populations represented in a seizure, but we can use the same genetic tools to link different seizures to the same underlying criminal network.”

Co-authors on the paper are former 91̽��Center for Conservation Biology research scientists Amy Torkelson and Sean Tucker; Center for Conservation Biology scientists Misa Winters and Yves Horeaux; Moses Otiende with the Forensic and Genetics Laboratory at the Kenya Wildlife Service; Frankie Sitam with the Malaysian Department of Wildlife and National Parks Peninsular Malaysia; forensic scientist John Buckleton, who is a visiting scientist at the UW; and , a 91̽��professor of biostatistics. The research was funded by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, the U.S. Department of State, the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime, the World Bank, the Woodtiger Fund, the Wildcat Foundation, INTERPOL, the Bosack Kruger Charitable Foundation, Paul and Yaffa Maritz, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Institute of Justice.

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For more information, contact Wasser at +1 206-853-4730 or wassers@uw.edu.

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aat0625

Grant number: 2011-DN-13X-K541.

“I’m just heartened. It’s very hard work to do. It’s stressful and frustrating,” Wasser said. “The award really makes me happy.”

Wasser holds the endowed chair in Conservation Biology at the UW, where he is a professor in the and director of the .

He has pioneered noninvasive methods to measure the abundance, distribution and physiological condition of wildlife from their feces, relying on detection dogs to locate these samples over large wilderness areas. The work has earned him the nickname “the Guru of Doo Doo.”

“I started working in Africa when I was 19 years old because I loved animals.  That was 1973. Since then, I have watched the rising toll that overconsumption, habitat destruction and poaching has had on the world’s most spectacular terrestrial and marine organisms,” Wasser said. “Unable to just stand by, my life’s mission became developing and applying noninvasive methods to uncover these human impacts, show them to the world, and offer solutions for change. I am deeply honored to have those efforts now be acknowledged by receipt of the Albert Schweitzer Medal.”

Awarded by the , past medal recipients include Jane Goodall and Rachel Carson, among others.

“Dr. Wasser’s groundbreaking work has paved the way for remarkable strides in the fight against wildlife trafficking, especially ivory trade,” said Cathy Liss, president of the Animal Welfare Institute. “The Animal Welfare Institute feels privileged to have this opportunity to acknowledge his accomplishments with the Albert Schweitzer Medal.”

Wasser’s wildlife field methods address diverse conservation questions, including impacts of poaching, oil development and overfishing on the well-being of multiple endangered wildlife populations. He also applies these tools to forensic analyses of transnational wildlife crime.

“It’s another affirmation of Sam’s work,” said , a professor of biostatistics in the 91̽��School of Public Health, of the accolade. “This gives 91̽��another feather in its cap, pointing to the tremendous breadth of expertise we have here.”

Notably, Wasser used elephant dung to assemble a DNA reference map of elephants across Africa, which is now widely used to determine the geographic origins of poached ivory. By comparing genotyped ivory to this reference map, he has been able to identify Africa’s largest elephant poaching hotspots, track the number and connectivity of major ivory traffickers operating in Africa, and uncover strategies that transnational organized crime syndicates use to acquire and move their contraband around the world.

“The award is saying that they are understanding the value of this approach, and this approach started at the UW,” Wasser said.

This work has led to prosecutions of major transnational ivory traffickers and nurtured key collaborations with the International Consortium on Combatting Wildlife Crime, INTERPOL, U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, the Task Force on Combatting Wildlife Trafficking, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Department of State and wildlife authorities in numerous source and transit countries across Africa and Asia.

“It was Sam’s science that really clinched this,” said Elliott L. Harbin, program manager, Environmental Crimes, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations.

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For information on how to obtain photographs of the award ceremony, please contact media@awionline.org or call 202-337-2332.

A multi-year survey of the nutritional, physiological and reproductive health of endangered southern resident killer whales suggests that up to two-thirds of pregnancies failed in this population from 2007 to 2014. The study links this orca population’s low reproductive success to stress brought on by low or variable abundance of their most nutrient-rich prey, Chinook salmon.

The , published June 29 in the journal , was conducted by researchers from the at the 91̽��, along with partners at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s and the . The team’s findings help resolve debate about which environmental stressors — food supply, pollutants or boat traffic — are most responsible for this struggling population’s ongoing decline.

“Based on our analysis of whale health and pregnancy over this seven-year period, we believe that a low abundance of salmon is the primary factor for low reproductive success among southern resident killer whales,” said lead author , a 91̽��professor of biology and director of the Center for Conservation Biology. “During years of low salmon abundance, we see hormonal signs that nutritional stress is setting in and more pregnancies fail, and this trend has become increasingly common in recent years.”

Southern resident killer whales typically feed from May to October in the Salish Sea, and spend winters in the open Pacific Ocean along the West Coast. Unlike transient orca populations that feed on marine mammals, more than 95 percent of the diet of southern resident orcas consists of salmon, with Chinook salmon alone making up about three-quarters of their total diet.

Scientists already knew that the southern residents, just 78 individuals in Dec. 2016, had a lower fecundity rate compared with orcas in northern British Columbia and southern Alaska. But the data gathered by Wasser’s team indicate that dwindling and variable salmon runs do more direct damage to the reproductive success of the southern resident population than increasing boat traffic in the Salish Sea. Impacts of nutritional stress on pregnancy failure are further compounded by the release of toxins, which accumulate in their fatty tissues.

To gather data about orca health and reproduction, Wasser and his team measured the breakdown products of key physiological and sex hormones in orca fecal samples, or scat. They also used orca DNA extracted from the scat to determine sex, family pod and identity of the individual responsible for the leavings.

Obtaining fresh orca scat is no ordinary task. Through the Center’s program, the team trained dogs to sniff out floating orca scat from the bow of research boats that trailed southern resident pods. The dogs could detect scat up to one nautical mile away. Using this approach, they collected 348 scat samples from 79 orcas between 2007 and 2014. On these fecal searches, the researchers also gathered extensive data on boat traffic in the area, which increased significantly during the study period.

The hormone levels they calculated from scat include progesterone, testosterone, glucocorticoid and thyroid hormone. Glucocorticoid and thyroid hormones play key roles in physiological stress responses — and determining levels of both hormones allowed researchers to differentiate between stress due to poor nutrition and stress due to external responses, such as boat traffic.

The researchers used progesterone and testosterone levels in scat from females to determine reproductive state. They could even determine whether a pregnant female was in the early or later stages of the 18-month gestation period for orcas. They then correlated these data and the date of collection with calf sightings to determine whether each pregnancy was successful.

In total, these hormone data detected 35 unique pregnancies among southern resident females from 2007 to 2014. In 11 cases, the individual female gave birth and was seen with a calf thereafter. But in 24 cases — 69 percent of total pregnancies — no live calf was subsequently seen, indicating that these pregnancies failed.

In most cases, the pregnancies likely ended in spontaneous abortion during the first half of gestation. But in one-third of the failed pregnancies, hormone levels indicated that the calf was lost in the latter half of pregnancy or moments after birth — stages at which the mother has already invested significant resources and is at higher risk of infection or complications when a pregnancy fails. These females also showed signs of nutritional stress, with ratios of thyroid hormone relative to glucocorticoid hormone nearly seven times lower than females who successfully gave birth.

“These findings indicate that pregnancy failure — likely brought on by poor nutrition — is the major constraining force on population growth in southern resident killer whales,” said Wasser.

The team compared their hormone data to records of Chinook salmon runs in the Columbia and Fraser rivers, the two most significant sources of Chinook in the southern residents’ natural range. They saw that large runs at those watersheds coincided with periods of lower nutritional stress in the orcas. But in years with poor runs at either site, signs of nutritional stress were higher. Boosting Columbia River and Fraser River salmon runs could help the killer whales recover, Wasser said.

“As it stands now, the orca numbers just keep declining with no signs of recovery,” said Wasser. “We’re losing a valuable resource here.”

Co-authors are , Elizabeth Seely and Rebecca Booth at UW; Deborah Giles and Kenneth Balcomb at the Center for Whale Research; and Jennifer Hempelmann and with the NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center. Lundin is now a postdoctoral researcher at NOAA. The research was funded by Washington SeaGrant, NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, the Canadian Consulate General, the 91̽��Center for Conservation Biology, the Northwest Science Association and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

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For more information, contact Wasser at wassers@uw.edu or 206-853-4730.

Grant numbers: NA10OAR417005, 91735201.

More than 90 percent of ivory in large, seized shipments came from elephants that died less than three years before, .

A team of scientists at the University of Utah, the 91̽�� and partner institutions came to this conclusion by combining a new approach to radiocarbon dating for ivory samples with genetic analysis tools developed by 91̽��biology professor .

Their approach gave conservationists a picture of when and where poachers are killing elephants. The , which includes Wasser as a co-author, was published Nov. 7 in .

“This work provides for the first time actionable intelligence on how long it’s taking illegal ivory to reach the marketplace,” said Lesley Chesson, a co-author and CEO of . “The answer is not long at all, which suggests there are very well-developed and large networks for moving ivory across Africa and out of the continent.”

“Apart from the actual killing, there’s the trade on the ground before it gets to ports, the actual shipments through shipping containers, and then the problem of the demand side,” said , the study’s lead author and professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah. “This additional information can be helpful to people trying to address those issues.”

In June 2016, the United States banned nearly all commerce in elephant ivory, which came 26 years after a ban on international trade in ivory. Both measures aimed to curtail the widespread poaching of elephants, whose numbers have plummeted since the 1980s.

Poaching still claims an estimated 8 percent of African elephants each year, or around 96 elephants per day. Demand for elephant ivory and other illegal products derived from endangered animals has grown in Asia in recent years, opening a fresh battleground in the struggle against illegal ivory, even as U.S. markets shut down.

Bans usually allow the sale of ivory that was legally acquired prior to 1976, including heirloom or antique pieces. Confirming the age of those pieces, however, relies on proper documentation. Traders in illegal ivory sometimes use this clause as a cover, claiming that their wares are older than they really are.

Cerling and his colleagues applied radiocarbon dating — a technique from forensic science — to estimate the age of samples in seized ivory shipments, with some adjustments for a Cold War legacy.

Above-ground nuclear weapons testing through the 1960s doubled the concentration of radioactive carbon-14 in the atmosphere. This heightened carbon-14 signature was preserved in plants — which take up atmospheric carbon — and transferred to herbivores like elephants. Carbon-14 levels have been declining since the 1960s, and scientists can use the carbon-14 signature in a bone, tusk or tooth to determine, within about a year, when the material was formed. And since elephants grow new material at the base of their tusks, the ivory there contains the carbon-14 signature of the plants the elephant has recently eaten.

Chesson said forensic scientists have used this “bomb carbon” signature to estimate the ages of human remains in cold cases and track the transit time of cocaine shipments. But now their team has applied this method to seized ivory.

Wasser led efforts to gather ivory samples from large stockpiles seized by law enforcement officials between 2002 and 2014. Alerted by contacts in law enforcement, officials in the seizing country or from internet monitoring, Wasser collected some samples himself and directed colleagues in sampling the rest. Officials in countries that had seized these samples were helpful and cooperative, he added.

“They really appreciate the collaborative effort,” Wasser said.

These samples consisted of small sections, only one or two inches on a side, from the inside surface of the base of the tusk — the freshest material with the radiocarbon signature most recent to the death of the elephant. Wasser said the sight of so many tusks in one place was distressing, particularly the tusks of young elephants shot by poachers to attract other larger elephants.

“Sometimes, many of the tusks are so small that you can’t understand why the animal was even killed,” Wasser said. “Tusks can weigh less than one pound, with almost no carvable ivory on them.”

Of the 231 samples Wasser collected, only one returned an age of greater than 6 years between the time of the elephant’s death and the seizure of the ivory — known as the lag time. Nearly all of the analyzed ivory had a lag time of around two to three years, suggesting that the shipments did not come from stockpiles or from old sources. Instead, large shipments of ivory are likely composed of recently poached pieces.

“This work demonstrates that little or no ‘old’ ivory, like that held in government stockpiles, is ending up on the black market, which is good news for the security and monitoring of those stockpiles,” Chesson said. “There is no other way to get such intelligence without a technique like ‘bomb-curve’ radiocarbon dating.”

Combining Cerling’s radiocarbon data with Wasser’s , the researchers constructed a picture of which regions have established rapid pipelines to get poached ivory to market. In the study, seized ivory is classified as either originating in East Africa, the Tridom region of west-central Africa, West Africa or Zambia. Additionally, samples were classified as having a rapid lag time of less than 12 months, intermediate lag time of 12 to 24 months or a slow lag time of greater than 24 months.

Ivory attributed to East Africa had a higher proportion of rapid-transit samples than the other regions, suggesting a strong distribution pipeline from the region. Ivory from Tridom was more likely to contain slow-transit ivory, and both West African and Zambian ivory exhibited intermediate lag times. The information, Cerling said, can help law enforcement focus on the worst poaching regions and also provide information on the health of elephant populations.

“If all of the seizures are really recent, within the past two to three years, we can use that to determine the overall killing rate of elephants in Africa,” Cerling said.

Time is running out for elephants, but these new analysis tools may help law enforcement officials plug the ivory-smuggling networks.

Co-authors were Janet Barnette with IsoForensics, Iain Douglas-Hamilton with and Oxford University, Kathleen Gobush with , of Columbia University and at the University of California, Irvine. The work was funded by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation and Save the Elephants.

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For more information, contact Wasser at 206-543-1669 or wassers@uw.edu.

Grant number: 11811.

Adapted from from the University of Utah with the permission of the author.

A team of conservationists at the 91̽�� is among the of the , an initiative from the U.S. Agency for International Development — USAID — in partnership with the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution and TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring organization.

The 91̽��team — based at the and led by biology professor and graduate student Hyeon Jeong Kim — received the award for to develop genetic tracking tools to identify poaching hotspots for pangolins, one of the most trafficked group of mammals in the world.

USAID sought submissions for the challenge on Earth Day 2015 as part of an endeavor to foster innovative technological approaches to combat wildlife poaching. from over 300 submissions, the Center for Conservation Biology will receive a prize of $240,000.

Pangolins are small, solitary and largely nocturnal mammals known for their distinctive, armadillo-like appearance. Four species are native to sub-Saharan Africa, with another four spread across south and southeast Asia. Pangolins curl their bodies into a tight ball when threatened, relying on scaled armor made from keratin — the same fibrous protein in our fingernails — for protection.

Those scales make pangolins meaty targets for poachers. Traditional medicines claim that pangolin scales harbor curative properties for a variety of ailments — long making the creatures prized in parts of Asia. The recent uptick in wealth in Asia has only driven up the demand for pangolin flesh and armor. Over a million pangolins have been captured illegally over the past decade. Conservation groups classify all eight pangolin species as threatened, endangered or critically endangered.

Wasser’s team proposed to map the genetic diversity of the four Asian pangolin species across their native ranges. Conservationists and law enforcement officials could then compare DNA samples from poached pangolins to this genetic reference map and determine where the poached creatures were captured and funneled into the black market.

For their reference map, Wasser and his team must obtain DNA samples from pangolins in the wild. They will use dogs specially trained to sniff out pangolin feces to find pangolin defecation sites so conservationists can extract DNA from these leftovers. Dogs would be trained through the UW’s program.

For the genetic reference map, they will also use with DNA extracted from tissue samples of pangolin museum specimens that were obtained from known locations. The 91̽��group will identify stretches of DNA that can be used to differentiate the pangolin species — as well as populations within each species — to give conservationists the most detailed information possible when determining pangolin poaching hotspots. As Wasser and his team have , this approach can help resource-strapped enforcement groups know where to be on the lookout for poachers and — hopefully — help stave off oblivion for the pangolin.

Project partners include the Smithsonian Institution and the Natural History Museum in London. They receive funding from the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund.

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For more information, contact Kim at kimh11@uw.edu and Wasser at wassers@uw.edu.

91̽�� biologist is a pioneer in using DNA evidence to trace the origin of illegal ivory and help police an international trade that is decimating African elephant populations.

The broadest application yet uses DNA from tons of ivory samples associated with large-scale trafficking. Results show that over the past decade, ivory has largely come from just two areas in Africa – one each for the forest and savanna elephants. The findings are published online June 18 in the journal Science.

“Africa is a huge continent, and poaching is occurring everywhere. When you look at it that way it seems like a daunting task to tackle this problem,” Wasser said. “But when you look at large ivory seizures, which represent 70 percent of illegal ivory by weight, you get a different picture.”

Wasser previously used DNA from elephant dung, tissue and hair collected across the African continent to genetic signatures for regional populations. He then developed to extract DNA from the ivory, allowing him to analyze seized contraband and determine the elephant’s original population.

Roughly 50,000 African elephants are now being killed each year from a population of fewer than 500,000 animals. Poaching is driving these iconic animals toward extinction, said Wasser, a 91̽��research professor of biology who directs the 91̽��.

Knowing the primary areas where elephants are poached could help combat ivory trafficking at its source.

“Understanding that vast amounts of this major transnational trade is focused on two primary areas makes it possible to focus law enforcement on those areas and eliminate the largest amount of illegal killing,” Wasser said.

His lab has been getting ivory samples, roughly half-dollar shaped disks from near the base of the tusk, since 2005. The number of seizures sent to his lab has greatly increased since 2013, when an international body unanimously that all large shipments of seized ivory should be subjected to forensic DNA testing to pinpoint their origin. These large shipments are associated with major transnational organized crime syndicates, and have been tied to the funding of African terrorist organizations.

In the new paper, the 91̽��group used its method to analyze 28 large ivory seizures, each more than half a ton, made between 1996 and 2014. The samples include 61 percent of all large seizures made worldwide between 2012 and 2014.

All but one of the 28 seizures were concentrated in only four areas. Most seizures made since 2006, the new paper reports, were concentrated in just two areas.

The analysis shows that:

• More than 85 percent of the forest elephant ivory seized between 2006 and 2014 was traced to the central African that spans northeastern Gabon, northwestern Republic of Congo and southeastern Cameroon, and the adjacent reserve in southwestern Central African Republic.
• More than 85 percent of the savanna elephant ivory seized between 2006 and 2014 was traced to East Africa, mainly from the in southeastern Tanzania and the in adjacent northern Mozambique.
• In 2011 the savanna elephant hotspot began shifting northward, from southeastern Tanzania toward the and in the country’s center, gradually creeping northward toward Kenya.
• The few seizures that did not fit the dominant geographic pattern showed other unusual signs, such as more complicated shipping strategies and a broader distribution of tusks.
• One of the biggest seizures contained large amounts of ivory from both hotspots, suggesting a link between the major dealers operating in these two areas.
• Of the 28 total seizures, 23 were genetically assigned to a different main country of origin than the country from which they were being shipped.

The investigations show a shift in poaching hotspots beginning in 2006. During the earlier years, 1996-2005, most forest elephant ivory Wasser analyzed was assigned to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, but none of the forest elephant samples after 2005 came from that area. Two seizures of savanna elephant ivory, in 2002 and 2007, came from Zambia, but the country was not represented in any of the samples after 2007.

Recent efforts to curb trafficking have focused on curbing demand, but Wasser believes that process happens too slowly.

“When you’re losing a tenth of the population a year, you have to do something more urgent – nail down where the major killing is happening and stop it at the source,” Wasser said. “Hopefully our results will force the primary source countries to accept more responsibility for their part in this illegal trade, encourage the international community to work closely with these countries to contain the poaching, and these actions will choke the criminal networks that enable this transnational organized crime to operate.”

Co-authors are and in 91̽��biology; , and in 91̽��biostatistics; and William Clark at INTERPOL.

The research was funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Leonard X. Bosack and Bette M. Kruger Charitable Foundation, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the World Bank, the Woodtiger Fund, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, INTERPOL, the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs as part of President Obama’s order to combat wildlife trafficking, the Wildcat Foundation, a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral and Professional Fellowship and the U.S. National Institute of Justice.

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For more information, contact Wasser at wassers@uw.edu  or 206-543-1669.