Brian Gratwicke

Attitudes Toward Consumption and Conservation of Tigers in China

A heated debate has recently emerged between tiger farmers and conservationists about the potential consequences of lifting the ban on trade in farmed tiger products in China. This debate has caused unfounded speculation about the extent of the potential market for tiger products. To fill this knowledge gap, we surveyed 1880 residents from a total of six Chinese cities to understand Urban Chinese tiger consumption behavior, knowledge of trade issues and attitudes towards tiger conservation. We found that 43% of respondents had consumed some product alleged to contain tiger parts. Within this user-group, 71% said that they preferred wild products over farmed ones. The two predominant products used were tiger bone plasters (38%) and tiger bone wine (6.4%). 88% of respondents knew that it was illegal to buy or sell tiger products, and 93% agreed that a ban in trade of tiger parts was necessary to conserve wild tigers. These results indicate that while Urban Chinese people are generally supportive of tiger conservation, there is a huge residual demand for tiger products that could resurge if the ban on trade in tiger parts is lifted in China. We suspect that the current supply of the market is predominantly met by fakes or substitutes branded as tiger medicines, but not listing tiger as an ingredient. We suggest that the Traditional Chinese Medicine community should consider re-branding these products as bone-healing medicines in order to reduce the residual demand for real tiger parts over the long-term. The lifting of the current ban on trade in farmed tiger parts may cause a surge in demand for wild tiger parts that consumers say are better. Because of the low input costs associated with poaching, wild-sourced parts would consistently undercut the prices of farmed tigers that could easily be laundered on a legal market. We therefore recommend that the Chinese authorities maintain the ban on trade in tiger parts, and work to improve the enforcement of the existing ban.

Composition of symbiotic bacteria predicts survival in Panamanian golden frogs infected with a lethal fungus.

Symbiotic microbes can dramatically impact host health and fitness, and recent research in a diversity of systems suggests that different symbiont community structures may result in distinct outcomes for the host. In amphibians, some symbiotic skin bacteria produce metabolites that inhibit the growth of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), a cutaneous fungal pathogen that has caused many amphibian population declines and extinctions. Treatment with beneficial bacteria (probiotics) prevents Bd infection in some amphibian species and creates optimism for conservation of species that are highly susceptible to chytridiomycosis, the disease caused by Bd. In a laboratory experiment, we used Bd-inhibitory bacteria from Bd-tolerant Panamanian amphibians in a probiotic development trial with Panamanian golden frogs, Atelopus zeteki, a species currently surviving only in captive assurance colonies. Approximately 30% of infected golden frogs survived Bd exposure by either clearing infection or maintaining low Bd loads, but this was not associated with probiotic treatment. Survival was instead related to initial composition of the skin bacterial community and metabolites present on the skin. These results suggest a strong link between the structure of these symbiotic microbial communities and amphibian host health in the face of Bd exposure and also suggest a new approach for developing amphibian probiotics.

Stability of Microbiota Facilitated by Host Immune Regulation: Informing Probiotic Strategies to Manage Amphibian Disease

Microbial communities can augment host immune responses and probiotic therapies are under development to prevent or treat diseases of humans, crops, livestock, and wildlife including an emerging fungal disease of amphibians, chytridiomycosis. However, little is known about the stability of host-associated microbiota, or how the microbiota is structured by innate immune factors including antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) abundant in the skin secretions of many amphibians. Thus, conservation medicine including therapies targeting the skin will benefit from investigations of amphibian microbial ecology that provide a model for vertebrate host-symbiont interactions on mucosal surfaces. Here, we tested whether the cutaneous microbiota of Panamanian rocket frogs, Colostethus panamansis, was resistant to colonization or altered by treatment. Under semi-natural outdoor mesocosm conditions in Panama, we exposed frogs to one of three treatments including: (1) probiotic - the potentially beneficial bacterium Lysinibacillus fusiformis, (2) transplant – skin washes from the chytridiomycosis-resistant glass frog Espadarana prosoblepon, and (3) control – sterile water. Microbial assemblages were analyzed by a culture-independent T-RFLP analysis. We found that skin microbiota of C. panamansis was resistant to colonization and did not differ among treatments, but shifted through time in the mesocosms. We describe regulation of host AMPs that may function to maintain microbial community stability. Colonization resistance was metabolically costly and microbe-treated frogs lost 7–12% of body mass. The discovery of strong colonization resistance of skin microbiota suggests a well-regulated, rather than dynamic, host-symbiont relationship, and suggests that probiotic therapies aiming to enhance host immunity may require an approach that circumvents host mechanisms maintaining equilibrium in microbial communities.

Is the international frog legs trade a potential vector for deadly amphibian pathogens

There have been surprisingly few analyses of how the international trade in amphibians for food affects the conservation status of this group. We analyzed information from the UN Commodity Trade Statistics Database and found that, by volume, Indonesia supplied nearly half of the animals entering the worlds US

The world can't have wild tigers and eat them, too.

40 million per year international frog legs trade, and that – collectively – France, Belgium, and the US imported more than 75% of all frog legs traded internationally. Nonetheless, a close examination of available information from 1996 through 2006 revealed that most countries throughout the world participated in the frog legs trade at some level. These extensive international amphibian trade networks could facilitate the spread of pathogens, including Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, which has been identified as a threat connected with the disappearance and possible extinction of over 90 amphibian species around the world. Given the size and extent of the international trade in frog legs, we advoca...

Evaluating the performance of a decade of Save The Tiger Fund's investments to save the world's last wild tigers

BRIAN GRATWICKE,∗ ELIZABETH L. BENNETT,† STEVEN BROAD,‡ SARAH CHRISTIE,§ ADAM DUTTON,∗∗ GRACE GABRIEL,†† CRAIG KIRKPATRICK,‡‡ AND KRISTIN NOWELL§§ ∗Save The Tiger Fund, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, 1120 Connecticut Avenue, N.W. Suite 900, Washington, D.C. 20009, U.S.A., email brian.gratwicke@gmail.com †Wildlife Conservation Society, 2300 Southern Boulevard, Bronx, NY 10460, U.S.A. ‡TRAFFIC International, 219a Huntingdon Road, Cambridge CB3 0DL, United Kingdom §Zoological Society of London, Regent’s Park, London, NW1 4RY, United Kingdom ∗∗Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, University of Oxford, Department of Zoology, Tubney House, Abingdon Road, Tubney, Abingdon, OX13 5QL, United Kingdom ††International Fund For Animal Welfare, P.O. Box 193, 411 Main Street, Yarmouth, Port, MA 02675, U.S.A. ‡‡TRAFFIC East Asia, Regional Office Room 2001, Double Building, 22 Stanley Street, Central, Hong Kong §§Cat Action Treasury, P.O. Box 332, Cape Neddick, ME 03902, U.S.A.

Surveying Europe’s Only Cave-Dwelling Chordate Species (Proteus anguinus) Using Environmental DNA

SUMMARY This is the first attempt to analyse the performance of US

How many wild tigers are there? An estimate for 2008

12.6 million invested by Save The Tiger Fund (STF) in more than 250 tiger conservation grants in 13 tiger-range countries. We devised a simple implementation evaluation method to assess performance on an ordinal scale using archival documents from project grant files. Performance was scored based on whether the grantee managed to achieve what they set out to do as articulated in their project proposal. On average, STF grantee project outputs exceeded their original objectives, but many confounding variables made it difficult to determine the ecological outcomes of grantees’ conservation actions. Successful projects were usually collaborative in nature with high community visibility and support, their results were disseminated effectively, and they informed policy, measured outputs, were grounded by strong sound science, supported by government agencies, attracted new donors and delivered results even when political factors created difficult working environments. The poorly performing projects were associated with one or more of the following factors: poor tracking of results, deviation from the proposal, poorly defined goals, lack of capacity, poor evaluation practices, lack of political support, weak transparency, work at inappropriate scales or purchase of high-tech equipment that was never used.

Reduced immune function predicts disease susceptibility in frogs infected with a deadly fungal pathogen

In surveillance of subterranean fauna, especially in the case of rare or elusive aquatic species, traditional techniques used for epigean species are often not feasible. We developed a non-invasive survey method based on environmental DNA (eDNA) to detect the presence of the red-listed cave-dwelling amphibian, Proteus anguinus, in the caves of the Dinaric Karst. We tested the method in fifteen caves in Croatia, from which the species was previously recorded or expected to occur. We successfully confirmed the presence of P. anguinus from ten caves and detected the species for the first time in five others. Using a hierarchical occupancy model we compared the availability and detection probability of eDNA of two water sampling methods, filtration and precipitation. The statistical analysis showed that both availability and detection probability depended on the method and estimates for both probabilities were higher using filter samples than for precipitation samples. Combining reliable field and laboratory methods with robust statistical modeling will give the best estimates of species occurrence.

Evaluating group housing strategies for the ex-situ conservation of harlequin frogs (Atelopus spp.) using behavioral and physiological indicators.

Publisher Summary The most recent analysis of tiger habitats suggests that tigers now occupy only 7% of their historic range and the area they occupy has decreased by as much as 40% in the past decade. The understanding of wild tiger populations and their habitats in many of the range states has improved substantially. Newer statistically robust estimates of tiger densities derived from camera-traps and population models, that estimate numbers using mark–capture–recapture methods are now available in the peer-reviewed literature from India, Nepal, Thailand, Lao PDR, Malaysia, and Indonesia (Sumatra), and scientists in the Russian Far East recently reported the findings of their decadal winter tiger track count in 2004–2005. This chapter supplements knowledge gaps in data-deficient areas by extrapolating recently published peer-reviewed tiger density estimates for those subspecies in known remaining tiger habitat. Current estimates of tiger numbers are arguably better than the previous ones. The financial and logistic costs of monitoring these elusive carnivores are substantial. Conservation organizations on the ground are in a constant balancing act, often justifying the need for immediate conservation interventions as higher priority than the need for more accurate documentation of the demise of the species. Conservationists will be able to make periodic landscape-level tiger population estimates that will allow to detect population changes and to evaluate conservation actions. These measurements will incrementally lead to a better understanding of the global status of the worlds largest and most charismatic cat.