The US Fish and Wildlife Lab Hopes So, But Science is Only Half the Battle

September 2002

First, they put him in a car without a working seatbelt and drove into oncoming traffic. This was an old KGB trick. Then they brought Ken Goddard to the office of Eugene the businessman. Eugene appeared to be a former military man. He had a crew cut and dressed impeccably, and everyone in the room seemed to be afraid of him. He picked up a sheet of paper from his desk. "Why do your lab reports say we're cheating our New York buyers?"

Goddard and his colleague Stephen Fain work in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Forensics Lab. They are forbidden to discuss ongoing cases. But they were locked in a room with a Russian businessman, and there was a 300-pound bodyguard blocking the door. So Goddard and Fain answered Eugene's questions. They discussed the nuances of mytochondrial DNA, of polymerase chain reactions, of primers and base markers. Goddard calls this technique "verbal judo," an old law enforcement strategem where you talk yourself out of trouble. In this case, he used every tool in his arsenal to bore his adversary into submission. At the end of the oration, Eugene, bleary-eyed, patted Goddard and Fain on the shoulders. "Good Americanskis," he said. He nodded to the thug at the door, who stepped aside to let the two scientists leave.

The Americans had come to Russia at the behest of the Russian fisheries bureau, which believes the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service confiscates imported caviar based on flawed science. In 1998, the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species, (CITES), listed sturgeon under Appendix II of the agreement, which sets quotas and regulations for the import and export of products. In the case of caviar - harvested sturgeon eggs, obtained by killing the fish - the Fish and Wildlife Service sends samples to Goddard's lab for DNA testing. If the tests find that the caviar is not from the species declared in the CITES permit, the service confiscates the shipment - to date, it has seized at least $120 million worth of illegal caviar.

DNA has become the keystone of criminal forensics, allowing law enforcement to pinpoint evidence with a level of specificity undreamed of in the days when most crime laws were written. In criminal cases, a DNA match with a suspect can eliminate doubt and seal the prosecution. In the case of laws designed to protect threatened species such as CITES and the Endangered Species Act, DNA tests allow scientists to identify genetic populations that need protection. Both supporters and detractors of endangered species laws have embraced the use of DNA evidence.

In the area of species identification, however, DNA leaves room for dispute. And this is why Ken Goddard and Steve Fain found themselves in Russia, explaining their methods to the likes of Eugene the businessman.

No one disputes that the sturgeon - the bony, bewhiskered fish that has plied the waters of the Northern Hemisphere for more than 200 million years - is in serious trouble. There are 27 known species of sturgeon in Asia, Europe and North America, all either threatened or endangered. Historically, most caviar comes from sturgeon caught in the Caspian Sea at the southern edge of the former Soviet Union, and it is in this region that the sturgeon's situation is most dire. In 1978, according to the World Wildlife Fund, there were 142 million adult sturgeon in the Caspian Sea. By 2001, that number had dropped to fewer than 300,000. The giant beluga sturgeon is in particular peril. Coveted for their gleaming, dark eggs, beluga populations have declined 90 percent in the last 20 years. Ossetra and sevruga sturgeon, the two other main Caspian trade species, have also been fished to the brink of extinction.

While Caspian sturgeon stocks have been under pressure from dams, pollution, and overfishing for decades, the dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991 precipitated a dramatic collapse in the fishery. The Soviets had tightly controlled caviar catches, but after that nation's dissolution, economic desperation, feuding among the five Caspian states and increasing demand abroad created an illegal market for caviar estimated to be 10 times the region's official catch.

As supply decreased in the Caspian, rising prices spawned criminal activity, and law enforcement officials soon found themselves fighting an increasingly futile battle against organized crime. Caviar "thugs" took to the open water with illegal nets and powerboats, bribing everyone in sight. They shot down government helicopters, tortured and killed policemen who continued to oppose them, even bombed an apartment complex housing families of the border police who sometimes intercepted their shipments, killing 67.

It's no wonder, then, that Ken Goddard and Steve Fain decided to leave Russia early. After their tête-à-tête with Eugene, their brush with death in the seatbeltless car, and an infuriating brush with bureaucracy in Russian customs (which confiscated the 200 sturgeon samples they had come to Russia to collect), Goddard and Fain had had more than enough Russian hospitality. "It was very hard for us to distinguish between the Russian government, the Russian businessmen, and the Russian mafia," says Goddard. Unfortunately, there is not yet a DNA test to identify those particular species.

Ken Goddard is a former police forensics specialist, an amateur cattle rancher, and a successful crime novelist. He has also been the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Chief of Forensic Science and director of the agency's Forensics Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon for the last 14 years. Hired in 1979 without a building, staff, or budget, Goddard, now 55, was charged with creating a lab to process evidence for enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, CITES, and all other animal-related violations. "This was the first attempt ever to create a full-service crime lab for wildlife," Goddard remembers. "We had to create the field as we went."

Today the $4.5 million lab, perched in a field outside of Ashland, has 19 scientists, state-of-the-art mass spectrometry facilities, electron microscopes, necropsy rooms, fingerprint rooms, databases, and a spectacular specimen collection. Every day, Fish and Wildlife inspectors and their counterparts in 160 countries send evidence to the lab for examination. Some of that evidence is on display in the lab's "shop of horrors," a collection of hides, heads, tusks, feathers, plus animal products such as snakeskin tennis shoes and a parrot feather tie. Some of these creatures died to satisfy the whims of the fashion industry (shahtoosh shawls of Tibetan antelope wool, a spotted leopard coat); others to prop libidos (walrus and tiger penises, rhino horns). All are in grave danger of extinction.

Since the ESA took effect in 1973, roughly 1,250 U.S. species have been listed as threatened or endangered. CITES protects over 30,000 plant and animal species worldwide. While seven domestic species no longer exist, others, like the bald eagle, have been brought back from the brink of extinction thanks to public awareness, sympathetic laws and vigorous enforcement. Without the technology to determine whether a piece of evidence comes from a protected species, however, it is very hard to enforce those laws. The lab's work is in many ways the link that makes them enforceable.

In the shop of horrors, Goddard picks up a caiman purse from the shelf, head still attached. "This is the $100 version," he says. It could come from nothing but the crocodile family. He holds up another, far more elegant pocketbook. "Now here's the $4000 version." To the untrained eye, it could be crocodile, snakeskin, or patterned leather. Later, we compare an elephant-foot ottoman and a pair of elephant-skin cowboy boots. Again, the ottoman quite obviously comes from an elephant. But the cowboy boots? "It could be cowhide pressed to look like elephant hide."

With human crimes, forensics specialists know the species they are dealing with. What they want to know is which human committed the crime. But with animal crimes, you must first identify the type of animal. Is the blood on a hunter's shirt from a deer, which is legal to hunt, or a mountain goat, which is protected? Are the boots made of cowhide, or elephant? "When you're taking away somebody's livelihood," says Goddard, "putting them in jail, destroying their reputation, you've got to be right."

In the case of the elephant boots, a morphologist would examine the boot's leather patterns under a microscope, comparing them to elephant tissue owned by the lab. Other evidence requires different specialties. The mass spectrometry lab can analyze hemoglobin to determine whether a spot of blood found in a hunter's truck comes from a protected moose; the necropsy team can examine a walrus carcass to determine the cause and time of death. The chemistry team can determine the poisons used to kill a bald eagle; the criminalistics team can lift fingerprints off dried leaves or match shotgun casings to a suspect's gun. The genetics team is identifying sequences for individual species, but it can also utilize DNA to match, say, an elk head confiscated on its way to the taxidermy shop with the body of an animal left to rot in the woods. But mostly, these days, its work involves identifying caviar.

Dyan Straughan, a geneticist with the Ashland lab, places two oily brown dots, declared to U.S. Customs as beluga caviar, into a plastic tube. She adds chemicals, places them in another tube, heats them, places them in yet another tube, adds chemicals, spins them in a centrifuge, heats them again, washes, spins, employs new chemicals, new tubes, heats one last time. She ends up with a clear liquid containing the isolated DNA of the two sturgeon eggs. The tube then goes to the sequencing room, where a gel is added which allows the lab to identify the genetic code.

If Straughan finds that the eggs are not beluga, the Fish and Wildlife Service will confiscate the entire shipment and prosecute the importer, as it did in 2000 after an inspector noticed labels peeling off a tin of caviar. Suspicious, he sent a sample to Ashland for testing, where they determined that the eggs, labeled as sevruga, in fact came from an endangered domestic sturgeon species. In the ensuing investigation, the agents seized an estimated $7.5 million in illegal caviar, much of it Caspian stock smuggled using false labels. The company's owners went to jail and were fined $10.4 million, the largest penalty ever assessed for a wildlife crime.

Other caviar seizures have generated more controversy. The Fish and Wildlife Service began confiscating caviar shipments after the lab's test found that 20 to 25 percent of ossetra samples also contained the genetic code of the Siberian sturgeon. Siberian sturgeon live across the Ural mountain range from the Caspian watershed, and Fain and Goddard believe the existence of the Siberian genotype suggests a fertile Russian-Siberian sturgeon hybrid - a cross between two distinct species - created by scientists during the Soviet era. Other researchers believe there are two genetic forms of Russian sturgeon in the Caspian, one of which shares the same ancestor as the Siberian fish. The Russians, however, argue that there is no Siberian genotype in the Caspian. They believe that Fain's test is simply wrong, and that the Fish and Wildlife Service is seizing millions of dollars worth of caviar based on flimsy methodology.

Among those who agree with that assessment is Vadim Birstein, a Russian molecular biologist who developed the first DNA test for sturgeon. When Fain developed his own test, Birstein attacked it, arguing that it had never been properly peer-reviewed and that the lab had insufficient sturgeon samples to develop an accurate test. (Fain says that the method has been confirmed by publications of other authors and will soon be published in its entirety.) Birstein felt so strongly about the test's failings that he served as an expert witness in a lawsuit filed by a restaurant which lost a large shipment of beluga after a sample failed Fain's test. "One egg stopped one ton of caviar," he recalls. "I don't care if this businessman is bad or good. Pseudoscience should not be used as a legal tool to punish bad people."

These feuds between scientists are more common than you would expect. This is, in part, due to dueling professional egos, but also because while the specificity of DNA testing answers many questions, it raises still others. Is one lab's test accurate? Are there hidden species detectable only through DNA testing? How do you define a species? "What is a sturgeon?" asks Vadim Birstein. "In the 19th century there were about 40 types of sturgeon described as species. Now they say there are 27. With new methodology and understanding of evolution, the number of species in a group is revised all the time."

Another example of the uncertainty spawned by DNA testing is the case of the Oregon Coho salmon. In September 2001, a U.S. District Court judge threw out the threatened species listing for the Oregon Coho based on the argument that the wild Coho was genetically indistinguishable from the hatchery salmon. (An appellate court reinstated the listing, pending appeal.) The judge based his decision on DNA tests commissioned by opponents of the listing, and the Bush administration has subsequently decided to review all salmon listings in the Northwest. Stephen Fain of the Ashland lab explains that even if the wild and hatchery fish are the same official "species," there are undoubtedly genetic differences between them. "The question is, are those differences relevant?" asks Fain. "Are they significant enough?"

There is, unfortunately, no easy formula for answering these questions, and Vadim Birstein, for one, believes that one major impact of endangered species regulations has been to create an industry out of scientific debate. Scientists and advocates on either side spend much of their energy arguing over the definition of a "species," while the animals continue to disappear. "All sturgeon professionals are absolutely devastated that it looks like it's the end of sturgeon," he says. "We have scientific implementation. It doesn't help sturgeons, but it stokes international conflicts of scientists."

Whenever Ken Goddard can, he escapes from his office and drives an hour and a half to Wildlife Images, an animal rehabilitation center in Merlin, Oregon. Tucked in the second-growth countryside that is home to loggers and survivalists, the center shelters some of North America's most endangered creatures - wolves, grizzlies, lynx, sandhill cranes - that have been injured or orphaned. For Goddard it is a relief to leave the endless succession of carcasses that travel through their evidence room and see some "animals that still blink."

On an early spring day, we walk to a row of wooden mews beneath a stand of Douglas fir. Side by side, birds of prey - a golden eagle, a prairie falcon, a great horned owl - stand on their perches awaiting their evening meal, while ravens and a red-tailed hawk circle overhead in hopes of raiding a scrap of leftover food. In two side-by-side cages sit a barred owl and a northern spotted owl, the small, unassuming bird that must nest in the canopies of old growth forests and has brought the timber industry to a standstill in parts of the Northwest. As logging has thinned the forest canopies, the barred owl, which makes its home in meadows and open woodland, has moved into spotted owl territory and driven its reticent neighbor into open country. There, the spotted owl is easy prey for hawks and larger great-horned owls.

"Should we kill one species to save another, or let nature take its course?" Ken Goddard asks me. I exchange wary stares with the spotted owl, unmoving on its perch.

Science - and reality - is complicated, and the law is a clumsy process, limping slowly behind the situation it seeks to remedy. Unfortunately for the humans and animals affected by endangered species laws, the science meant to clarify those laws often complicates them more. "A hunter or fisherman has to decide to shoot or not, or to release or not, based on sight. You can't do DNA testing out in the wild," Goddard points out. "We can prosecute using tissue, but did the defendant know? The law has to be obeyable as well as enforceable."

END