Photo credit: Matt Chatfield
Summary
As one of the most endangered vertebrate groups on Earth, turtles have suffered from overcollection to meet the demands of a growing illegal pet trade. To circumvent prosecution, poachers often ‘launder’ turtles to hide their origins, passing smuggled turtles off as legally captive-bred. Unfortunately, law enforcement authorities around the world lack the analytical toolkit necessary for determining if turtles were poached from the wild or raised in captivity; the former classification being necessary to put poachers behind bars. The use of chemical analyses in wildlife forensics holds tremendous promise for determining the origins of animals confiscated by law enforcement. Chemical analysis of animal tissues can be used to objectively differentiate between wild-caught and captive animals based on differences in the chemical compositions of their tissues, which reflect differences in their diets and habitats. In this study, we extend our recent efforts of building predictive models used to classify wood turtles in Maine as wild-caught or captive-bred to other geographic regions and species of concern. Our goal is to develop a conservation tool that can be used by law enforcement to determine whether confiscated wood, spotted, Blanding’s, and box turtles were poached from the wild or raised in captivity and determine the geographic origins of wild turtles in hopes of repatriating them without ecological consequences. Thus far, we have published the following papers related to this work with others on the way:
Hopkins, J.B. III, C. A. Frederick, D. York, E. Pollock, & M.W.H. Chatfield. 2023. Advancing forensic chemical analysis to classify wild and captive turtles. Diversity 15(10), 1056, https://doi.org/10.3390/d15101056. Special issue: Stable Isotope Ecology LINK
Hopkins, J.B. III, C. Frederick, D. York, E. Pollock, & M.W.H. Chatfield. 2023. Forensic Application of Stable Isotopes to Distinguish between Wild and Captive Turtles. Biology 11:1728. Special issue: Applications of Stable Isotope Analysis in Ecology LINK