PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Vipin
AU  - Vinita Sharma
AU  - Chandra Prakash Sharma
AU  - Surendra Prakash Goyal
AU  - Sandeep Kumar Gupta
TI  - Horn trophy seized in illegal wildlife trade assigned to swamp buffalo using a combined morphometric and DNA based approach in wildlife forensics in India
AID  - 10.1101/2021.09.27.461958
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.09.27.461958
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/09/28/2021.09.27.461958.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/09/28/2021.09.27.461958.full
AB  - The illegal wildlife trade has threatened the existence of many extant wild animal species throughout the world. While dealing with the illegal wildlife trade of horns, we face problems of not having a proper protocol and lack of reference database to assign the species for proper implementation of wildlife laws. In one such condition, a horn trophy suspected to be of a wild buffalo was seized by authorities and sent to us for species identification. We used a combined approach of morphological and DNA analysis to ascertain the seized horn’s species. The two measurements, circumference at the base (CAB) and length on the front curve (LOFC) were measured for the seized and other horns of different bovid species, showing morphological resemblance with the seized horn. The 3-D scatter plot, generated by the values of CAB, LOFC and CAB/ LOFC, differentiated the different bovid species into distinct clusters and placed the seized horn in the proximity of domestic buffaloes. The Bayesian evolutionary analysis of the partial D-loop gene (521bp) placed the seized horn in a clade with swamp buffaloes. Since swamp buffaloes are domestic buffaloes, both these approaches concluded the same results. Hence, the current protocol developed may also be used to differentiate among wild buffalo, domestic buffalo, Cattle, Wild yak, Gaur and Takin using a combined approach of morphometric and DNA-based analysis, which may be used to deal with illegal wildlife trade of different bovid species at the world level.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.