Stop Wildlife Poisoning

Category: Uncategorized | Date: Jul 28 2008 | By: ngaio

Hi all,

First of all, Martin thank you SO much for all your posts, you’ve put so much time into them and they are really informative. I have been horrified to read about the ongoing indiscriminate use of Furadan, it’s a wonder we have any wildlife left in Kenya at all!

I have been very remiss about posting blogs, but I only have a few more weeks in lab now and then I’ll be able to finish and submit my thesis and do other things! I’ve been developing forensic methodology to detect diclofenac in the hair of livestock animals and the feathers of vultures. You have all undoubtedly heard about the Asian Vulture Crisis but if not please have a look at: http://www.vulturerescue.org/.

Why look for diclofenac in hair and feathers? Well, for one thing, they are very resistant to environmental degradation, much more so than tissues like kidney or liver, which are usually analysed for residues. Drugs of abuse have been detected in human hair and lots of environmental contaminants have been detected in feathers, so it’s just a matter of seeing whether the principles of incorporation and detection apply for diclofenac and other drugs in the same category.

Now I say ‘just’ a matter, but I’m a wildlife biologist by training and not a chemist, and this is a very technical project. Since I have started this work there have been many times when I felt completely overwhelmed by the chemistry and thought I must be the wrong person to be doing this research. I had to learn how to use a GC-MS (which stands for gas chromatography mass spectrometry).  Very rarely have our instruments worked the way they should, if at all. Often they have required weeks of maintenance. And all the time I am receiving messages from colleagues that residues of diclofenac are still being found in carcasses in India, that diclofenac was registered for veterinary use in some parts of Africa, and here I am tinkering away trying to get my equipment to work and give me the results I need to finish so that I can maybe, perhaps make a contribution to help the vultures and other endangered or threatened wildlife in some small way. That was my intent, anyways.

I have been fortunate enough to live and work in some really beautiful wild places and I feel happiest outside doing field work. I used to study little Eastern Screech-owls, surely one of THE most uncooperative birds ever, and some of my fondest memories are of sitting in the bed of my truck in the dead of night in the middle of an apple orchard listening to families calling to one another. So having spent three years of my life doing lab-based work has been torturous in many ways. I have felt a restlessness  I didn’t know I possessed, a sense of being trapped, cooped up with no possibility of escape. I desperately miss being in the field, although one of the most obvious drawbacks there is coming across the carcasses of wildlife species.

But I’ve gained some very valuable insight since I started this work, insight that’s helped me understand and appreciate the complexities of technical analysis, much more than when I was collecting samples and handing them over for someone else to analyse. We are conditioned, especially in North America I think, to view forensic analysis, whether it is for investigations of incidents against people or wildlife, with awe.  Television programmes give us the idea that you pick up a sample from a crime scene or from the field then put it in a baggie and hand it to a technician who pops it into a machine that tells you what nasties are in it and what they’re used for, essentially revealing to you how they got there in the first place. In fact what actually happens is that you don’t often know what you’re looking for when presented with a sample, and need to keep an open mind. The residues may have been in the sample to begin with, but it’s been outside for so long that the sample itself has degraded and is no longer useable.  It can take a few days to prepare a sample for analysis, and when you run it you then have to tease out all the different compounds that show up. If the cause of death is not something routinely screened for, or a compound that is causing mortality for the first time, or its structure doesn’t quite match up with the instrument’s reference library, you may miss it altogether.

Even at the best of times instruments like GC-MS or HPLC (high pressure liquid chromatography) which are high precision and absolutely ESSENTIAL for positive identification of residues of pesticides or harmful compounds in wildlife samples require a lot of tender loving care.  They are fiddly, so you open them up to fix one problem and you unwittingly cause a whole slew of secondary problems. Labour and parts can be very expensive too. But the running and maintenance costs are worth it because these instruments are the best tools we have to positively identify the presence of residues in wildlife samples. The awe is warranted in this sense, it is amazing to me that someone had the wherewithal to put the chemistry and physics and mechanics together, these instruments are fantastic!  And we take them so much for granted here in the UK, and in North America. They are just part of the background in many of our university laboratories. But in Africa, the reality is that very few university, government or industry laboratories have them.  So how do we monitor for presence of contaminants in wildlife species, and how do we gather reliable scientific evidence to document the damage that compounds like carbofuran are having?

I just wanted to give some perspective of the logistics involved in documenting evidence of wildlife mortality and identifying the cause, whether it’s exposure to diclofenac or carbofuran, or strychnine.  It’s a mammoth task in itself, let alone given limited resources. And I wanted to say that even though I’ve missed being in the field I’m really glad I took on this project because of what it’s enabled me to learn. Not everyone gets to take apart expensive pieces of equipment like I do (and I confess it it gives me a certain devilish satisfaction to do so when the instrument is not behaving itself!), nor do they get to experience the process of wildlife forensics from the field to the analysis. And do I ever admire the hard work and dedication of the people working diligently in the field and in laboratories throughout Africa.

These instruments aren’t used to full advantage if the samples aren’t received in good condition, or the screening method is restricted in the number and types of compounds that can be detected, or the resources aren’t available to ensure they are kept in proper working order.  A lot of good work is being done to remedy this though, as you will know from reading Martin’s blogs and the other blogs on this website. The monitoring efforts and instruments are only as good as the people running them, and we are blessed with some GREAT people!

When I finish this work I’m going to look for funding to help with provision of laboratory instruments and technical support  as well as running costs, starting in Kenya. I’m collaborating with a UK-based charity called the Foundation for Analytical Science & Technology in Africa who provide laboratory instruments and ongoing technical support to university laboratories in Africa.

Now, manufacturers such as FMC have a lot more resources at their disposal to mount a case in their favour, so contributions from all of you are always very welcome, and very much appreciated. We need all the help we can get! Come to think of it, perhaps FMC would care to help as well, as a show of good will, to ‘offset’ the fact that they continue to manufacture and sell Furadan despite being aware that it is widely used to poison wildlife species in Kenya and elsewhere. Ah, but they must realize that the lack of resources in this area works all too well in their favour, for the moment…