DNA data to help save bushmeat animals

Harvesting wild animals for sale as food is a large, mostly illegal business that threatens wild animal populations and puts humans at risk for exotic infections, witness the SARS outbreak in 2003. Regulations and treaties exist, but before these can be enforced, one needs to establish the species origin of bushmeat and other derived marketplace products. Here DNA can help. In 1 September 2009 Conservation Genetics (open access article) researchers from University of Colorado, Barnard College, and American Museum of Natural History describe DNA barcodes for 23 species of South American and Central African primates, ungulates, and reptiles regularly harvested for bushmeat. Equally important as the DNA sequences, Eaton and colleagues report high success (179/204 samples (87.7%)) with primer cocktails first developed for fish DNA barcoding by Ivanova et al 2007, demonstrating these can serve as universal vertebrate primer cocktails. Intraspecific variation was low (mean 0.24%) and differences among congeneric species was generally high (average 9.77%), making assignment to known species straightforward using either tree-based maximum likelihood or character methods.

This report is focused on documenting barcodes of bushmeat species, using well-identified vouchered specimens (1 vouchered specimen labeled as Melanosuchus niger (Black caiman) was found to be Caiman yacare (Yacare caiman).  The researchers did test a handful of unknown or partially identified specimens; all with recoverable COI sequences could be assigned to known species in the data set using the tree-based or character methods as described. Remarkably, Eaton and colleagues were able to recover COI DNA from 1 of 5 leather goods, which had been impounded by the US Fish and Wildlife Service as likely of CITES species origin. This proved to be Crocodylus niloticus (Nile crocodile). Recovering DNA from leather suggests many unsuspected household items have legible DNA barcodes.

I only wish the research report could have included pictures–there is so much more we might learn. There is an AMNH webpage describing the project which has several interesting images, although these are unlabeled and not referred to by the text. Perhaps we need a “mash-up” utility into which one could insert a scientific paper, which then would pull in relevant material–images, maps, links. Along these lines, there is a very neat Encyclopedia of Life NameLink utility which automatically detects scientific names and inserts hyperlinks to relevant EOL pages–try it!