09-07-2025
Can CSI tactics stop a $23 billion poaching industry?
From DNA sequencing to fingerprint analysis, forensic scientists are using groundbreaking new tools to stop animal smugglers—one gorilla handprint at a time. A border officer with CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, holds a tiger hide seized at London's Heathrow Airport—part of a crackdown on the deadly trade. Photographs by Britta Jaschinski
The sound of a gunshot alerted the rangers that something was amiss.
Advancing through the forest in the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary in western Thailand, they arrived at a campsite littered with evidence of murder. The blood-soaked carcass of a barking deer lay on the ground. Other bits of victims—a kalij pheasant and a rare black leopard—oozed on a cutting board and simmered in a soup kettle. The rangers arrested four people at the scene on suspicion of poaching protected species and violating gun laws, crimes punishable by a maximum 10-year jail term. But there was a complication. The leader of the hunting group was Premchai Karnasuta, a construction-empire tycoon and one of Thailand's most prominent and powerful men.
Karnasuta professed his innocence, apparently trusting that his well-paid lawyers would get him off. But he hadn't counted on the doggedness and determination of Thailand's wildlife police. The rangers cordoned off the crime scene and seized the carcasses, along with three rifles, rounds of ammunition, the bushmeat in the kettle, and later, even a pile of human excrement. The evidence was then transported in sealed bags to a crime lab in Bangkok, where technicians under the supervision of Kanita Ouitavon, director of the parks department's Wildlife Forensics Laboratory Center, sequenced the DNA of the bushmeat and the feces and the Police Forensic Science Office conducted ballistics tests on the carcasses.
(From forest to table: Inside the world's bushmeat problem.) London Metropolitan Police forensic photographer Mark Moseley used his crime scene expertise to develop a process for revealing human fingerprints up to a month old on porous elephant tusks.
Call it CSI: In the Bush. To combat a surge in poaching and wildlife smuggling in Asia and Africa, conservationists and police are turning to methods long reserved for homicides, sexual assaults, and other crimes with human victims. DNA sequencing, fingerprint analysis, infrared imaging to detect blood, ballistics tests, and additional scientific techniques have been utilized with success against miscreants ranging from pangolin poachers in Zimbabwe to peregrine-nest raiders in Scotland. Gorillas have unique palm- and fingerprints. Specimens like this one at London's Natural History Museum are helping forensics experts practice how to collect and catalog the differences among live gorillas in Africa. That way, if one gets poached, its prints can offer a clue to where the crime occurred.
A dramatic change in wildlife statutes has led to the increasing reliance on forensics. In the past, poachers and traffickers caught in the act typically pleaded guilty and paid a token fine. But between 2010 and 2016, as poaching numbers soared, countries began to drastically raise their penalties. 'They went from a fine of $50 for possession of ivory to up to 10 years in prison,' says Rob Ogden, director of conservation science at the University of Edinburgh and a specialist in DNA profiling. Criminals with resources began hiring skilled lawyers to fight it out in court. 'The defense started saying things like, Prove that it's ivory,' Ogden says. 'Prosecutions collapsed because they lacked the scientific evidence.'
The scientific evidence analyzed in the Bangkok lab was critical in bringing Karnasuta to justice. The defense attempted to discredit the forensics and the evidentiary chain of custody, but Ouitavon, the lab director, left no doubt in the judges' minds that Karnasuta's group had shot the animals. In 2019, a court sentenced the tycoon to three years and two months and a two-million-baht ($59,700) fine, an outcome hailed by the WWF as 'a victory for wildlife and a victory for the rule of law.'
(How the DNA method that caught the Golden State Killer can help catch elephant poachers.) Globally, the illegal wildlife trade is estimated to be worth as much as $23 billion a year. Traffickers fashioned this elephant foot into a minibar that could fit bottles, glasses, and ice. Seized at Heathrow, the carcass of this juvenile Siamese crocodile, mislabeled here as an alligator, was purchased by a vacationing tourist. Commercial farms in Southeast Asia often sell the reptiles as novelties; Siamese crocodiles are critically endangered.
Karnasuta's conviction comes at a time when wildlife and the rule of law are both under siege. High prices for ivory, rhino horn, pangolin scales, and other wildlife products such as bushmeat; the growing sophistication of insurgent groups and international crime organizations; and endemic corruption are all putting unprecedented pressure on endangered species. In South Africa, poachers slaughtered 10,334 rhinos, both black and white, between 2006 and 2024—the equivalent of two-thirds of the country's entire population. The majority of horns end up in Vietnam and China, where they are carved into decorative objects or ground into powder for sale, allegedly as medicine. Africa's elephant population dropped from 472,269 to about 415,000 after the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in 2008 permitted a onetime sale of ivory to China, stimulating demand and opening the floodgates for laundered tusks. The numbers have stabilized, but the pachyderms remain in danger. Pangolins, tigers, snow leopards, and many other species are also considered at grave risk. The United Nations estimates the global illegal wildlife trade to be worth as much as $23 billion a year.
(More species than you think are part of wildlife trade. These may be next.)
Wildlife experts have begun training law enforcement officers in Africa and Asia to back up their arrests with evidence that will stand up in court. Tracy Alexander, director of forensic services for the City of London Police, recalls that when she started working with police in Zimbabwe, 'they would stop a car [based on a tip], find rhino horns in the back, four mobile phones, and three guns. The driver would say, 'I know nothing about this; I'm just the driver.' The guy in the passenger seat would say, 'He just picked me up, and I know nothing.' The two guys in the back would say, 'We just asked for a lift.' Then they would let them go.' Now the wildlife police learn how to dust for fingerprints (technically known in forensics as finger marks or ridge details), data-mine cell phones, conduct ballistics tests, and seal off crime scenes. Grant Miller, countertrafficking adviser at the Zoological Society of London, who has trained ecological police in Mongolia and park rangers in Thailand, the Philippines, Benin, Cameroon, Nepal, Niger, and Kenya, says that officers once 'passed around elephant tusks and rhino horns and posed with the contraband without using gloves.' But they're coming to understand that effective crime fighting 'means avoiding contamination and finding evidence that will be admissible in the courtroom.' Advancements in molecular biology have helped researchers such as Louise Gibson at the Zoological Society of London's wildlife lab identify through DNA analysis exactly what species may have been killed for fur or skin-based products.
In India, the Forest Department and the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau implemented a cutting-edge intelligence-gathering system that led to 73 arrests and the dismantling of an elephant-poaching network that ravaged the population in 2015. In Mongolia, a haven for vulnerable and endangered species ranging from snow leopards to saker falcons and wild camels, the ecological police teamed with the Zoological Society of London and Mongolia's National Forensic Agency and the Zoological Society Luujin. Now 'they're well trained, and they have a sophisticated forensic setup,' says Alexander, including 'a DNA lab, the whole nine yards.'
(What drives elephant poaching? It's not greed.)
The wildlife cops are also benefiting from new tools aimed at improving evidence gathering. At the London Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory in Lambeth, I met Mark Moseley, a silver-haired police photographer, 50, who spends his workdays snapping bloodcurdling images of homicide scenes. In his spare time, he experiments with forensic innovations aimed at combating wildlife crime. Moseley achieved his first breakthrough 12 years ago, after his two young daughters came across online photos of decapitated elephants while making elephant-themed birthday cards for their grandmother. The girls begged their father to invent a technique that would give the cops an edge in the war against poachers. Moseley turned to the method pioneered by Sir Edward Henry of the British colonial police in India 130 years ago: lifting fingerprints.
Elephant tusks are coated in cementum—a porous material that resembles a sponge when looked at through an electron microscope—and fingerprints left by poachers and smugglers rarely survive for more than seven days using traditional powders. Moseley wanted a material that would provide a record of the numerous hands that pass over ivory during the weeks that often elapse between poaching in the bush and smuggling overseas. In 2015, after months of testing compounds, Moseley came across SupraNano Magnetic Powder, a fingerprint enhancer made up of microscopic chemical particles that can both absorb and repel sweat and oils. It proved capable of retrieving finger-ridge details for up to 28 days after prints were deposited. 'The powder fit into those tiny pores, which the others couldn't do, so we were bringing back much higher resolution,' Moseley explained.
Moseley's innovation took off. The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), in partnership with the United Kingdom's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, distributed a hundred fingerprinting kits—two jars of the magnetic powder and a magnetic wand, brushes, and lifting tape, packed into a durable plastic orange case—to police and rangers in 23 countries in Africa and Asia. In 2017, IFAW announced that the Kenya Wildlife Service had arrested 15 people, including five police officers, after using the kits to identify the suspects by their fingerprints on confiscated ivory. The kits have also been tested successfully on rhino horns, tiger claws, hippopotamus teeth, sperm whale teeth, and even eggshells—all coveted by traffickers. In Hamburg, Germany, border agents discovered a shipment of 50 packages of reptile leather that didn't have proper documentation, so they were held for testing. The result? Roughly one-third were linked to protected species.
Moseley's kits have their limitations. Fingerprint databases are still so underdeveloped in Africa that the chances the marks will turn up any matches remain low. Most African police departments lack Wi-Fi and mobile fingerprint scanners that allow officers to send the images from cell phones to data centers, which are also often lacking. And many cops don't seem to be invested in the new method. 'I went to a wildlife crime conference in Kenya, after the kits were distributed,' says Alexander. 'I asked people there, 'How many finger marks did you get?' 'A few.' 'How many IDs?' 'We don't do that.' 'Where are the finger marks now?' 'I've stashed them in my drawer.' '
In 2015, Grant Miller, then working for the U.K.'s Border Force, used the SupraNano powder to dust an ivory shipment seized by customs at Heathrow Airport on its way from Angola, trafficked by Vietnamese nationals. The dusting turned up several sets of fingerprints, but technicians couldn't hit on a match in the U.K.'s vast database. Since the highly publicized busts in 2017, not a single arrest has been attributed to the powder kits.
Despite those disappointments, Tracy Alexander and her partners at King's College London are working with a fingerprint-gathering technology called vacuum metal deposition, which uses a sealed chamber and metal rods to bring out prints on canvas bags and other non-smooth surfaces, including elephant tusks that have been buried in the ground for long periods and have accumulated a coating of dirt or mud. (London police once used the technology to expose a victim's face on the pillow that was used to smother her.) The Zoological Society of London, meanwhile, is promoting a gel lifter that can pull prints from pangolin scales—whose uneven surfaces, like those of tortoise shells, also make ordinary powders useless. The pliable gel goes deep into the grooves, and a camera and a light source are used to expose the finger ridges. But the gel has yet to be distributed for wildlife forensic purposes, and Lisa Hywood, who rescues orphaned pangolins in Zimbabwe and rehabilitates and reintroduces them into the wild, doubts it'll work in the African bush. 'You bring the gel into an environment with a temperature of 88 to 104 degrees, and it disintegrates,' she says.
(The vast majority of animals in the wildlife trade are not protected.) At the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change in Hamburg, a DNA sequencing machine lights up to indicate it's 'in progress' as it determines a species' identity from seized material.
So far, the biggest successes in wildlife forensics have had nothing to do with identifying perpetrators. Because attorneys often challenge prosecutors to prove that a seized object is, say, a rhino horn or an elephant tusk, forensic crime labs run DNA tests to determine the species beyond a reasonable doubt. The Trace Wildlife Forensics Network, an Edinburgh-based nonprofit, has provided funding and support for Kanita Ouitavon's laboratory in Bangkok since 2010, and has since worked alongside governments to develop DNA testing facilities in Malaysia, Vietnam, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Gabon, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Eswatini. Rob Ogden of the University of Edinburgh, who is a co-founder of Trace, recalls a Zambian colleague mentioning a case in which it was argued that a zebra skin belonged to 'a striped cow'; now such blatant assertions are easily demolished in the lab. He estimates that prosecutors present DNA evidence in wildlife cases '50 times a year' in Thailand and Malaysia. DNA sequencing can also prove that purported wildlife contraband isn't what it appears to be: Fraudsters often melt horse hooves into the shape of a rhino horn, which can fetch black-market prices of $20,000 or more a kilo. 'The DNA is not going to lie,' in such a case, Ogden says. 'It changes the nature of the offense from selling an endangered species to mislabeling, which is a minor crime.' Six of the world's seven species of sea turtle are vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered. This one, confiscated in Germany, is part of the Leibniz Institute's collection of seized items that are now used for research and for educating the public about the enormous impact of wildlife trafficking.
Kyle Ewart, Trace's forensic research manager, last year launched TigerBase, a DNA profiling system for the endangered big cats. Dozens of 'tiger farms' in Thailand breed the animals lawfully and offer tourists the chance to feed adults and cuddle with cubs. But some farms illegally snatch cubs from the wild and pass them off as captive bred. A few also serve as tiger slaughterhouses, clandestinely chopping up the corpses and selling their parts—pelts, claws, fangs, even entire dead cubs and 'tiger bone wine' in jars—on the black market in China and Vietnam. TigerBase aims to establish a DNA registry of captive tigers throughout Southeast Asia, to trace them to their points of origin to support investigations into tiger killers and tiger launderers. 'You get DNA profiles for all your captive tigers, and if there's a new cub on the scene, you can say, Where did this cub come from?' the Australian scientist told me. 'In the past they would say, 'These two parents.' And you had no way to disprove that, but now we can.'
(Who buys lion bones? Inside South Africa's skeleton trade.) At Heathrow, border officers with CITES seized this bear head, illegally shipped to the United Kingdom. Thought to have been a brown bear, it was later confirmed to be a black bear with a genetic mutation called the cinnamon morph—resulting in a lighter, reddish coat.
Forensic scientists are also using DNA to crack down on the illegal trade in peregrine falcons, listed by CITES since the 1970s as a protected species. In the 1990s, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, in conjunction with U.K. police and the Department of the Environment, pioneered the use of genetics to identify raptor chicks stolen from the wild. These birds were illegally declared to be captive bred and were traded commercially. Over a decade later, following a controversial relaxation of regulations and a rise in peregrine prices in the Middle East, wild chick thefts began to surge. Lucy Webster, of the Department of Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture, updated the DNA methodology to help the police crack down. Recently Webster's DNA lab outside Edinburgh played a key role in Operation Tantallon, a Scottish police investigation that snared a gamekeeper and his son in a plot to launder and sell 23 wild peregrine chicks and two eggs to wealthy falcon racers in the Middle East. DNA sequencing is also being employed to pin down the geographical origins of poached pangolins, elephants, and other endangered species. Investigators hope the information will help map illegal trading routes, point to specific organized crime groups, and single out vulnerable subspecies. But most forensics experts concede that the day when such data yield actionable intelligence is still far in the future.
(This unorthodox method is saving baby parrots from the illegal wildlife trade—and extinction.) The tools of the rhino trafficking trade include high-caliber bullets and leg snares (seen here on x-rays)—and even occasional fake horns to trick buyers. A jar (upper right) is made from a rhino calf's foot, while a glass beaker holds a confiscated liquid, yet to be tested, sold on the black market as medicine.
Mark Moseley is also looking far ahead. Moseley's latest forensics adventure is, like his fingerprint project, a mix of the visionary and the quixotic. Horrified by photos of severed gorilla hands for sale in an African market, he devised a method of tracing the endangered apes and their body parts. By doing so, he hopes to pinpoint areas of intense poaching activity and gather intelligence on criminal gangs involved in the gorilla trade. 'I thought, How can we do something to identify the remains and create a deterrent?' he told me. Moseley's solution: photograph and record the ridge details of the hands and feet of gorillas when they're sedated or being released into the wild.
A few years ago, he spent months at the Natural History Museum, preparing for fieldwork by photographing prints from taxidermied apes or alcohol-preserved extremities dating to the Victorian era or earlier. Later he moved to the London and Chessington zoos and the Aspinall Foundation, where he captured prints from gorillas sedated for surgery. Moseley's 21-year-old daughter, Mia, designed colorful graphics of gorilla hands and individual fingers for an academic paper about the project—reflecting Moseley's efforts to bring a new generation into conservation.
Now the Zoological Society of London and the UN's Great Apes Survival Partnership are aiming to 'kick-start this in the wild,' Moseley says. Although he has accumulated just four sets of wild gorilla prints for his database, he insists he's optimistic. 'Once it's out there and everybody becomes aware of it, the data will drip-feed in,' he told me. In wildlife crime forensics, everyone seems to be playing the long game.
(Finding a forever home for trafficked tarantulas.) A version of this story appears in the August 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine.
To report on this story, Berlin-based Joshua Hammer got to know the scientists and police pushing the boundaries of the field. His new book, The Mesopotamian Riddle, tells the true story of unlikely Victorian sleuths cracking the mysteries of the world's oldest script.
