S.P. Goyal
Wildlife Institute of India, India
Title: Development in wildlife forensics in dealing with offences of bears in India
Biography
Biography: S.P. Goyal
Abstract
Wildlife poaching has been serious threats to the conservation of species and lack of appropriate wildlife forensics has precluded proper implementation of national laws and international treaties in the south and south-east Asia. A beginning in establishing wildlife forensics was made through a collaborative project of USFWS for better implementation of laws and treaties. Of the 3000 cases received by the Institute since 1986, 46 cases were of bears. Of these 56 percent were of Himalayan black bears (HBB) whereas remaining were of sloth bear (SB). Reported parts in Bears offences were bear bile (40.0%), canine (3.1%), skin (12.3%) bones (15.4%), paws (6.2% ) penis ( 1.5%), claws (6.2%), fat (1.5% ), meat (10.8%) and others. 92% bile of HBB were only from Uttarakhand and most of the seizures were from 1 to 14 bile and in 20 per cent cases, bile were traded along with the pods of musk deer. The majority of cases of were of Police and seizure were made through information provided by the informer. Hence, we suggest for establishing a strong network of intelligence collection in the range states of HBB. Given international demand for bear parts, we discuss the development of protocols for identifying species using hair characteristics (13 to 17 characters) in cluster analysis, claw characteristics and measurements in Discriminate Function Analysis, TLC and DNA-based techniques. For avoiding false positive, we used three genes (Cyt b, 12s and 16s RNAs) for identifying species having unique SNPs between 4 to 16 among four bear species. We also suggest using multiple analytical approaches for the conclusion. We discuss observed sex in the bile of HBB and likely implications for population demography. Our optimized protocols may be shared through training with other enforcement agencies of the south and south-east Asia countries for effective implementation laws and treaties. We need to establish fatty acid signatures of all the bear species for dealing with offences related to body fats.