190 see in the trade.” But, she says, “we don’t know how many pangolins are left.” “It will be so sad if a species like that goes extinct before we can even study them in the wild,” she said. Follow the Birds Tracing an international supply chain would depend upon a network of partners from across the globe: over a dozen research organizations and government agencies, including the International Union for Conservation of Nature, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and universities in countries such as China, Gabon, Nigeria, Cameroon, and the Czech Republic. The project was born out of efforts to track and map pangolin poaching by the Congo Basin Institute, a joint initiative of UCLA and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. But the idea to map the origins of seized pangolin scales was inspired partly by similar estimation for trafficked elephant ivory and would depend upon a set of techniques first developed for tracking breeding populations of migratory birds. The genomic approach was developed by the UCLA’s Center for Tropical Research Bird Genoscape Project. “Let’s say you have a species of bird that you’re seeing population decline in the US, but they winter throughout Central America,” Tinsman said. “Figuring out where in Central America the threatened populations rely on over the winter is really important for their conservation.” Bourbon barrels must be made of white oak according to laws that guide the distillation and processing of the spirit. “We’re getting really fine-scale resolution with where pangolins are coming from in Central Africa,” she says. Tinsman—who began studying the white-bellied pangolin at the institute—says that even before the surge in poaching, due to their size and behavior, the animals were already hard to study in their habitats, and difficult to tag. And they don’t do well in captivity. “We have a really good sense of how many tigers are left in the wild, how many elephants are left in the wild, how many rhinos are left in the wild, other big charismatic things that we The map of genomic data shows the location of distinct population clusters of white-bellied pangolin.
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