Wildlife CSI

Australian science is catching up with illegal traffickers of precious wildlife.

- Angela Heathcote

More than a million pangolins were estimated to have been illegally tracked around the world during the 10 years to 2017, leading to an enormous decline in their wild population. Australian scientists are helping to put an end to the trade in these endearing anteating mammals.

CHRIS SHEPHERD FELT frustrated and furious when he heard of yet another attempt to launder wild-caught echidnas through Indonesia. Transporting native Australian fauna overseas is tightly regulated but traders in Indonesia exploit loopholes in the legislation and these echidnas came with paperwork that described them as captive-bred. As director of the South-East Asian branch of wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC, Chris suspected the paperwork was fake. He knew successful breeding of echidnas in captivity was almost unheard of and shared his concerns with conservation biologist Dr Phoebe Meagher and her Taronga Zoo colleagues.

“One of Chris’s biggest frustrations was that his team knew a lot of the poachers were forging documentation for echidnas that had been caught in the wild and putting them down as captive-bred,” Phoebe says. “I knew this couldn’t be right. Taronga, as a leading Australian wildlife and conservation group, has only been able to breed a handful of short-beaked echidnas, despite concerted effort and expertise.”

Since 1900, fewer than 50 captive-bred echidnas are known to have survived infancy. It was unlikely any private group had managed to breed the monotremes. Phoebe began searching for a scientific way to prove Chris’s suspicions that these animals had been unlawfully snatched from the wild.