Transcript of Can tech help to combat the illegal trade in elephant ivory? | BBC News

A dead Samartian elephant. It's tusks removed. Poachers are suspected. To protect elephants, the transnational trade in modern ivory is banned by international convention. But tusks of the type seen in this footage from Russia in 2016 aren't prohibited. That's because they've come from the elephant's extinct Ice Age relative, the mammoth. Tons of ancient tusks are extracted from the frozen ground every year. But telling the difference between legal mammoth ivory and illegal elephant ivory is a real problem for border security, and is even a challenge for mammoth experts at the Natural History Museum in London. Hi, Adrian.

Lovely to see you.

Very nice to meet you. In his office, Professor Lister had gathered together lots of examples of mammoth ivory. What What is a mammoth?

Well, a mammoth was a species of elephant. They were actually quite closely related to the living elephants. But the mammoth was a species of elephant adapted to the cold conditions of the Ice Age, and they had a huge distribution. It's been estimated there were probably as many as 10 million mammoths at their peak.

How hard is it to tell the difference between mammoth ivory and elephant ivory?

Once a piece has been carved, like this little mammoth model, which is made of mammoth ivory, actually, I know that because I bought this at a mammoth ivory shop in Alaska where they dig up the tusks. However, if I didn't know that, I couldn't tell. I've been working on mammoths for decades and elephants, but you can't Can you tell whether that is mammoth or elephant ivory. The only way you could tell would be to actually take a piece of this and submit it either for radiocarbon dating, because a mammoth would be tens of thousands of years old, or DNA analysis. But first of all, that's destructive of the specimen. Secondly, it's expensive and would take time, weeks before you got the result.

If you're a border security guard, trying to stop the trade in illegal elephant ivory, a tough job to try and tell the two apart.

Yes, you couldn't really. There's not really any way of knowing.

I mean, we've got a piece of elephant ivory here. How easy would it be to disguise this as mammoth ivory?

Very easy You see this piece of elephant ivory that's been in the museum for years. Here's an equivalent tusk tip from a mammoth, and all you would have to do would be to stain this a brown color, and you couldn't tell the difference.

So this is a school of anatomy you'd never guess, would you? At Bristol University, Dr. Rebecca Sheppard, with help from Professor Lister and others, has found a quick way to tell different types of ivory apart using lasers.

There's a piece of equipment at airports around the world called a Raman spectrometer, and this is already used in the identification of materials for things like drugs and unidentified liquids. We're trying to repurpose this to tell the difference between elephant and mammoth ivory. Essentially, it shines a laser at a sample, and the way that laser bounces back to the detector can tell you really detailed information about what the material is made of.

There are people running legitimate businesses carving mammoth ivory, and presumably But your technique will be useful for them because it gives them a way of proving, Look, this is legal mammoth ivory.

Absolutely. It can be used to just prove that sample is what it says it is.

Is there a lot of interest from law enforcement in this new technique?

There is. I've been talking to people within border force in the UK and UK Wildlife Crime Agency, and there is potential use for this in law enforcement in the UK.

You're also thinking about different types of things that you could identify using this tech.

I had a really interesting conversation with somebody from Homeland Security recently who said that it's a bit of a problem people trying to smuggle eggs of endangered bird species across the border from Mexico. So the next project I'd like to get started is to see if we can tell the difference between eggs of different species.

Since she published her results, Dr. Sheppard's work has attracted international interest.

So I'm currently in Hong Kong, and I'm here to present my research, a work workshop that's designed to get together people involved in preventing wildlife crime from across all of Asia. So there's people from WWF, people from border force, people from Homeland Security, and everyone with an interest in wildlife crime.

Well, the mammoths are extinct, helped on their way by human beings. Some people fear, elephants might go the same way.

Mammoths only went extinct for 1,000 years ago. We think that the reason for that was a double whammy of climate change that was happening at that time and hunting by people. When we look at modern elephants, they are faced by the same combination of factors. So the mammoth, if you like, is a a lesson from the past that if we don't do something about it, the living elephants may go the same way..