What COVID has taught us about the wildlife trade
Wildlife trade is the third largest illegal market in the world behind drugs and munitions – so the fact that COVID-19 may have emerged from this trade tells us more regulation is vital
CHRIS HATZIS
Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis, let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.
Recognizing that COVID-19 may have emerged from the trade of wildlife, several governments around the world have enacted new or more effective regulations to control this trade.
Gerry Ryan is a PhD student in the School of Biosciences at the University of Melbourne and a conservation scientist working on Southeast Asian and Australian biodiversity. He’s also a board member for the Society for Conservation Biology Asia, and in 2020, Gerry collaborated on a paper titled “COVID-19 Highlights the Need for More Effective Wildlife Trade Legislation” published in the journal “Trends in Ecology and Evolution.”
Gerry says that more epidemics like COVID-19 are inevitable unless we revisit our relationship with the natural world.
Gerry Ryan sat down for a Zoom chat with Dr Andi Horvath.
ANDI HORVATH
Gerry, what do you say to people at barbecues that you do?
GERRY RYAN
It depends who they are. If it’s a little kid, sometimes I’ll say something like I count vultures or I chase possums around an imaginary forest and count what happens to them. If it’s someone a bit older, I’ll say, I do modelling for wildlife conservation. If it’s someone who’s in the sector, I’ll say, I tend to look at a range of decision-making processes and look at quantitative methods. So, statistical, mathematical type modelling approaches to look at how we can improve making decisions for wildlife conservation so that there’s more trees in a forest, more possums climbing those trees, more dolphins swimming the rivers and the oceans.
ANDI HORVATH
Gerry, I think you’re the right person to ask, what’s the connection between global pandemics, humans, livestock, wildlife and conservation? I know that’s a huge question, but where do we start to tackle this discussion topic?
GERRY RYAN
Yeah, it’s a huge topic. It’s one that lots of people have been looking into for a long time. But in these times of a global pandemic, where absolutely everyone’s affected, it’s really come into focus. So, people, particularly in the veterinary field, have had this concept for a long time of one health. The idea that human health is absolutely intricately interlinked with wildlife health and wildlife diseases.
So, we’ve seen, for history eternal, that diseases cross into humans from wildlife. So, as we’re in a more and more connected world and humans are still interacting with wildlife, although many of us spend our times in the city, maybe not interacting with too much, but the birds in our backyard. But there’s all sorts of pathways for diseases to cross from wildlife to humans and then spread very rapidly, as we’ve seen last year and into 2020.
ANDI HORVATH
Is that what they refer to as zoonotic diseases?
GERRY RYAN
Yeah, that’s right. So, a zoonotic disease is really any disease, virus, a bacteria, that’s originated in wildlife and can cross into humans. So, we’ve seen that recently with things like... the Ebola virus is believed to have come from an antelope animal in Africa. The AIDS virus is believed to have come from chimpanzees. Most recently, the COVID-19 – the virus – that disease comes from the SARS-CoV-2 viruses. I think believed to have come across from bats, though we’re not really sure if it’s come through some intermediary animal, as well.
ANDI HORVATH
I’ve also heard pangolins mentioned. Those funny scaly looking small creatures.
GERRY RYAN
Yeah, pangolins are - they’re a very cute little animal, but they’re unfortunately for them, the most wildly illegally traded species on the planet. They’re a little anteater type animal. They’ve got scales all over their back and they tend to curl up into a little ball when they’re threatened. A little bit like an echidna here, but they don’t have the spikes. They’ve just got thick scales. The scales are made of the same stuff as our hair and fingernails. They’re used in a lot of traditional medicines in parts of Asia. They’re also traded for eating.
They’ve been linked to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s not yet clear what their role, if any, was in the transmission pathway of that virus from bats through to humans. Whether or not they jumped. They’re a very common species in market places in Asia. So, it’s possible that the virus came to us via pangolins.
ANDI HORVATH
You mentioned that there’s a supply/demand relationship with pangolins in that they’re eaten and they’re used for medicine. But is there actually any science that medicine works?
GERRY RYAN
Well, there’s a lot of traditional medicines that have been used for a long time that seem to have had some sort of effect over a long period of time. I’m not specifically familiar with pangolin scales, but I know that keratin, which is what hair and scales are made of, is often thought to have an effect similar to aspirin, which is a drug that we can produce very cheaply and is widely available around the world. So, if that’s about all it’s useful for, it’s probably not necessary to be catching pangolins when we can just go down to the pharmacy for an aspirin.
ANDI HORVATH
Your work is involved in the conservation of South East Asian countries and Australian biodiversity. Why that particular catchment? Are we the Amazon of the south?
GERRY RYAN
So, South East Asia and Australia have got just wonderful biodiversity. Obviously, we know Australia’s fauna is very, very distinctive. We’ve got all sorts of marsupials, kangaroos, possums, that we don’t see anywhere else in the world. We’ve got wonderful monotremes, so, egg laying creatures that are absolutely nowhere else. They’re your echidnas and your platypuses.
South East Asia’s got its own wonderful suite of biodiversity, but it’s also very, very threatened. There’s obviously some great big cities in South East Asia and the human population is really big. So, there’s a lot of demands on land in South East Asia. So, there’s a lot of competition between people and wildlife for space as well.
ANDI HORVATH
You mentioned you were counting vultures. So, what part of the conservation do you analyse and why?
GERRY RYAN
So, vultures is a fascinating microcosm of the interaction between humans and wildlife. So, particularly in India and parts of South Asia, about 15 years ago to 20 years ago, people started noticing that vulture populations were starting to decrease. People tend to hate vultures. They think they’re ugly. They think – they eat dead things. They’re pretty nasty. People really don’t have a good impression of them. But they provide a really useful service in that they’re natures’ cleaners. So, they clean up all of the rotten stuff that’s around.
One of the services that they did was to clean up dead cattle. But unfortunately, people had been using a drug to treat some problems in buffalo and in cattle, which is similar to a drug that people use to treat joint pain in humans. What was happening is that when these animals died, if they had this drug in their system, if vultures ate that carcass it caused organ failure, which meant that a large number of vultures will eat a carcass. So, if that carcass is, essentially for them, poisoned then huge numbers of birds can die. So, the populations declined very, very quickly.
Then, what we saw was populations of feral dogs in cities increasing, because there’s suddenly a whole lot more meat left around and there weren’t the vultures to be eating it. So, vultures, particularly in South and South East Asia, really the populations have declined. So, there’s been a lot of focus on conservation of vultures over the last decade or so, because of this problem.
So, they’ve also taken steps in Nepal, in India and various other countries to ban the use of these drugs in livestock, so that the vultures are not – are able to come back.
ANDI HORVATH
So, how do you count vultures?
GERRY RYAN
So, one of the problems of vultures has been that their food sources are often contaminated. So, one tool that’s used in vulture conservation is a thing called a vulture restaurant. That is, a means to provide safe food through carcasses that are known not to be contaminated with these drugs that are bad for vultures. That’s a tool that’s regularly used in Europe and Spain, all the way across Asia. Vulture restaurant is really just a fun name for a place that the carcass is laid out semi-regularly.
So, the way you survey vultures, is to sit in a bird hide, which is often a tent or a little shack structure hidden away so that the birds don’t get scared off. You sit there with a pair of binoculars or a telescope and watch who comes in. You tend to get lots of different species of vultures coming down. You’ll get other scavenger birds. You’ll get other scavengers like jackals or sometimes wild dogs coming in. For someone who likes to sit and watch nature, it’s about as good as you can get in terms of work.
ANDI HORVATH
In ecology everything’s integrated. So, how do you analyse a specific part or critical species?
GERRY RYAN
Yeah, I’ll be honest with you, ecology’s an absolutely mess. It is really complicated. So, it’s one thing if you want to do an experiment in a lab and you can control everything really nicely. But out in the real world, there’s so much going on, it’s just a mess. So, it makes ecology a really difficult science. Conservation science is the linking of largely human behaviours and human interactions with the ecological world. So, you’ve got this really big complex set of interactions that makes it really hard to isolate problems and to solve them in conservation.
So, the best way to do that is to try to just look at piece by piece and slowly build up a picture over time, but it’s really difficult. Because getting data on any particular species usually involves a huge amount of field work just to get small amounts of data. So, it’s a very difficult science to do and it’s a very expensive science to do.
ANDI HORVATH
So, with biodiversity, do you get to a point where you have to triage what you’re going to save or put your efforts into?
GERRY RYAN
Yes, the biodiversity triage debate. There’s a clear shortfall of resources to be able to do all of the conservation that we want to do. So, we know that around the world most species are declining. You look at something like the living planet index, which is an index produced by WWF, that looks at populations around the world since 1970. In just about every area, they’re on decline in average. We just don’t have enough resources at the moment put to save everything. To stop those declines, let alone reverse them.
So, then comes the triage debate. We say, okay, well, what’s the easiest thing to do that’s going to give us the best bang for our buck? We should do that and we should – therefore that means we ignore other species. People don’t like that idea, because people don’t want to say we should let things go extinct in order to save other things.
ANDI HORVATH
So, essentially, you’re making decisions against - one species against another. But everything is interconnected.
GERRY RYAN
Absolutely. So, the point is though, we – unless we have enough resources to do everything, we are making decisions to let some species go while we focus on others. We might not be doing it explicitly, but we’re doing it implicitly by the species that we choose to focus on. These are really valued decisions. They’re not necessarily scientific decisions. Scientists can tell you this is what we’re able to do. This is the best of our knowledge. This is what we think is likely to have the greatest effect or to protect the species that we want to protect. But ultimately, the decision about what we want to focus on is not a decision for science. It’s a decision for people. It’s a decision for governments who represent those people.
ANDI HORVATH
I’ve heard the term Lazarus species. What does that mean?
GERRY RYAN
So, Lazarus was a biblical figure that came back to life. In a biological sense or in a conservation science sense, these are species that we thought were extinct and were rediscovered some time later. So, a great example of a Lazarus species, is the Victorian faunal emblem, which is the Leadbeater’s Possum. It was first seen in the 1800s and then it disappeared for a long time. No one saw one until one was seen again in the ‘60s. There’s lots of species like that that are seen a long, long time ago and then not accounted for, at least by scientists, until often decades later.
ANDI HORVATH
Does conservation give us ideas about what regulation needs to be done?
GERRY RYAN
So, we’ve seen, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, reactions from a number of countries in Asia to bolster their regulation of wildlife trade markets. That’s really positive. So, we’ve seen improvements from countries like Vietnam, from China, from Korea. We’d really like to see strong responses from lots of other countries, too, I think. This is really a time that we can use the – never let a good crisis go to waste is the old adage. I think that’s important.
Wildlife trade is the third largest illegal market in the world behind drugs and munitions. It happens because, in many cases, it’s allowed to happen. It’s not necessarily seen as particularly taboo. So, we’re continuing to see problems like – and we will continue to see problems like we’ve seen with this pandemic, if the illegal wildlife trade continues to flourish. So, it’s important that lots of governments around the world, use this as an opportunity to improve their regulations and improve their enforcement of existing regulations.
ANDI HORVATH
Is it also a matter of education?
GERRY RYAN
Absolutely. So, in many cases, wildlife trade continues because people are ignorant that it is not allowed. In many cases, it’s a subsistence activity, as well. So, it’s important that we’re not preventing people from getting access to nutrition that they need. But, at the same time, we need to make sure that people are aware of regulations that are in place.
ANDI HORVATH
Gerry, what inspired you to get into ecology and conservation research?
GERRY RYAN
Well, I think - it doesn’t take much to inspire me these days when I can get up and look out the window and see the bird life around us and just – I tend to just look at it in wonder. But that’s because I know so much about the complex lives of these birds, the grasses that are growing outside, the trees. It wasn’t always that way.
So, when I was younger, I was absolutely obsessed with animals. But then I lost a lot of that as I was growing older. I wanted to be a mechanic. I went and did engineering and just realised that I absolutely hated it. But for some reason I picked up a little bit of biology in my early science and realised, again, my childhood wonder at the natural world. That’s what really got me back into wanting to investigate and explore and learn more about the natural world.
Of course, once you start learning about it, you get inspired to protect it, because you realise that there are so many problems out there. That the forests are heating up and they're contracting. There are fewer fish in the sea. There are fewer birds in the sky. It makes you want to do something about it.
ANDI HORVATH
Gerry, what misconceptions have you encountered when you tell people you’re an ecology major and you’re doing conservation research?
GERRY RYAN
I think people often tend to assume that anyone who's interested in protecting the environment and interested in doing research about ecology and animals, hates people. I’ve found that that’s often the opposite of the truth. Of course, you get angry people in every field, but I think that, by far, most people in modern conservation science realise that it is about providing win-wins for society and the environment. I think that most people, myself included, think that one of the main reasons that we need to protect the environment is because we’re protecting ourselves. It’s an investment in our own future. Call it enlightened self-interest or something like that.
ANDI HORVATH
Gerry, what would you like to activate in society if you had unlimited funds?
GERRY RYAN
One of the most important areas that we need to look into, and one of the most difficult problems to try and address in conservation science, is the interaction between the frontlines of areas in mostly the tropics, where we’ve got lots of poverty and lots of wonderful biodiversity. They’re in a really tragic conflict where subsistence farmers are living a really hard life. Often, the only way that they can survive is in conflict with the need to protect the local environment.
It’s really important that we need to bring local people along. We need to make sure that local people are getting the development opportunities to improve their lives that people are getting in big cities. But we need to also make sure that we’re empowering them to protect their local environment. So, places like South East Asia where you’re seeing poor subsistence shifting farmers who don’t have any land. Where you’re seeing the frontlines of deforestation in forests like the Amazon and places like Africa. That’s where we really need to work and that’s where it’s really hard, because we need to make sure that we’re supporting people at the same time as protecting the wonderful biodiversity that they’re the custodians of.
ANDI HORVATH
I like the fact that you say conservation is really about not just protecting wildlife, but at the nth degree, it’s protecting ourselves and our viability on the planet. So, what would you like us to think about next time we’re gazing at our wildlife out the window, be it a bird or an insect or something?
GERRY RYAN
One of the things that I often find myself meandering off into thought is about how interconnected we are and how wonderful these little things are that are surviving around us. But they’re also helping us thrive. You can think how much poorer our experience in lockdown in Melbourne would’ve been if we weren’t able to sometimes gaze out the window at a Rainbow Lorikeet, able to see a tree over the road or able to go down to the park and have a picnic with our family or our friends. They’re the things that really, I think, have been keeping us bright. They’re the things that will continue for a long time to help us survive into the 21st century.
ANDI HORVATH
Gerry Ryan, thank you for making us think about the science, the social and even the psychological of what wildlife means to us. Thank you.
GERRY RYAN
My pleasure.
CHRIS HATZIS
Thank you to Gerry Ryan, PhD student and conservation scientist at the School of Biosciences, University of Melbourne. And thanks to Dr Andi Horvath..
Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on November 16, 2020. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website. Production, audio engineering and editing by me, Chris Hatzis. Co-production - Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath. Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, Copyright 2021, The University of Melbourne. If you enjoyed this episode, review us on Apple Podcasts and check out the rest of the Eavesdrop episodes in our archive. I’m Chris Hatzis. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.
More epidemics like COVID-19 are inevitable unless we reassess our relationship with the natural world.
That’s according to Gerry Ryan, a PhD student in the School of Biosciences, a conservation scientist working on Southeast Asian and Australian biodiversity and a board member for the Society for Conservation Biology Asia.
He employs statistical, mathematical modelling to look at how we can improve making decisions for wildlife conservation, particularly as competition for space between people and wildlife increases – both here in Australia and across South East Asia.
But while the illegal wildlife trade flourishes, we will continue to see problems like we’ve seen during this pandemic; and governments must use this as an opportunity to improve their regulations and enforcement in order to protect the health of wildlife and humans in the future.
Episode recorded: November 16, 2020.
Interviewer: Dr Andi Horvath.
Producer, audio engineer and editor: Chris Hatzis.
Co-producers: Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath.
Banner: Getty Images
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