Valuable stones: The trade in porcupine bezoars

Heinrich, Sarah; Toomes, Adam; Gomez, Lalita

doi:10.1016/j.gecco.2020.e01204

Cited by 11 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Porcupines were among the animals in demand, aside from tigers, Helmeted Hornbills and, pangolins. Heinrich et al (2020a) also note the international nature of the trade in porcupine bezoars with ~20% of online adverts selling porcupine bezoars, offering international shipping. As none of the porcupine species native to Indonesia are listed in the appendices of the CITES, there is no data available for international trade, making it nearly impossible to monitor trade, regulate international trade and identify trends of concern.…”

Section: Porcupine Use and Trade Hotspotsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…In another incident, involving 64 live pangolins, the suspect arrested confessed to keeping porcupines in stressful conditions to induce the formation of bezoars which takes place after approximately 6-7 months at which point the porcupines are killed, the bezoar extracted and sold for IDR150K (~USD11). While there were few seizures involving porcupine bezoars, Heinrich et al (2020a), found a substantial number of porcupine bezoars for sale online in Indonesia. Based on seller location obtained, the majority of these were in Java (31 listings), followed by West Kalimantan (12 listings) and Sumatra (9 listings).…”

Section: Porcupine Use and Trade Hotspotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In traditional Chinese medicine, there is a particularly high demand for porcupine bezoar due to the perception that it has many healing properties (Brown 2015;Lee et al 2015;Tan et al 2019). A centuries old practice, the use of porcupine bezoars for medicine appears to have increased significantly in recent years (Lee et al 2015;Heinrich et al 2020a).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…During a 2019 survey for porcupine bezoars on e-commerce websites in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, 121 adverts selling approximately 680-1332 bezoars were obtained over a three-month period (Heinrich et al 2020a). The majority of these adverts were located in Indonesia i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The illegal hunting and exploitation of porcupines for meat and medicine in Indonesia

Gomez¹

2021

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Indonesia is home to five species of porcupines, three of which are island endemics. While all five species are currently assessed as Least Concern by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, impacts of harvest and trade have not been factored in. To gain a fuller understanding of the porcupine trade in Indonesia, this study examines seizure data of porcupines, their parts and derivatives from January 2013 to June 2020. A total of 39 incidents were obtained amounting to an estimated 452 porcupines. Various confiscated commodities revealed porcupines are traded for consumption, traditional medicine, trophies/charms as well as for privately run wildlife/recreational parks. Targeted hunting of porcupines for commercial international trade was also evident. Porcupines are also persecuted as agricultural pests and wildlife traffickers take advantage of such situations to procure animals for trade. What clearly emerges from this study is that porcupines are being illegally hunted and exploited throughout their range in Indonesia facilitated by poor enforcement and legislative weakness. Porcupines are in decline due to habitat loss, retaliatory killings and uncontrolled poaching. It is therefore crucial that effective conservation measures are taken sooner rather than later to prevent further depletion of these species. Including all porcupines as protected species under Indonesian wildlife laws and listing them in Appendix II of CITES to improve regulation, enforcement and monitoring of domestic and international trade trends involving porcupines in Indonesia would contribute significantly towards this end.

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Section: Porcupine Use and Trade Hotspotsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Porcupine Use and Trade Hotspotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The illegal hunting and exploitation of porcupines for meat and medicine in Indonesia

Gomez¹

2021

Self Cite

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“…A few highly visited websites may have APIs that allow for easy collection of data; this is more likely to be the case for social media websites (e.g., Twitter; Toivonen et al 2019). Choosing manual or automatic data collection will depend on how long and how often data is being collected, as it takes technical expertise and time to build web scrapers, which may not be necessary if the number of target websites is small and the data collection window is short (e.g., Heinrich et al 2020). These methods of data collection apply to websites and content on the deep web (including social media) and dark web, as long as researchers have access to the website/content (e.g.…”

Section: Collecting Data From Websitesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A guide to using the Internet to monitor and quantify the wildlife trade

Stringham¹,

Toomes²,

Kanishka³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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The unrivalled growth in e-commerce of animals and plants presents an unprecedented opportunity to monitor wildlife trade to inform conservation, biosecurity, and law enforcement efforts. Using the Internet to quantify the scale of the wildlife trade (volume, frequency) is a relatively recent and rapidly developing approach, which currently lacks an accessible framework for finding relevant websites and collecting data. Here, we present an accessible guide for internet-based wildlife trade surveillance, which uses a systematic method to automate data collection from relevant websites. The guide is easily adaptable to the multitude of trade-based contexts including different focal taxa or derived parts, and locations of interest. Furthermore, as wildlife trade on the Internet becomes more widespread, the ability to collect large amounts of data on traded wildlife will become possible and desirable. Using a case study where we monitor 53 websites, we demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of this kind of large-scale surveillance system. We collected over half a million unique listings in a year and estimate that it would take over two years for one person to clean every listing. We propose that the development of machine learning methods for automation of data collection and processing become a priority and be tested for a variety of different contexts of wildlife trade-related web data.

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Porcupine quills keratin peptides induces G0/G1 cell cycle arrest and apoptosis via p53/p21 pathway and caspase cascade reaction in MCF‐7 breast cancer cells

Wang,

Xu,

Huang

et al. 2023

J Sci Food Agric

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BACKGROUNDPorcupine quills, a by‐product of porcupine pork, are rich in keratin, which is an excellent source of bioactive peptides. The objective of this study was to investigate the underlying mechanism of anti‐proliferation effect of porcupine quills keratin peptides (PQKPs) on MCF‐7 cells.RESULTSResults showed that PQKPs induced MCF‐7 cells apoptosis by significantly decreasing the secretion level of anti‐apoptosis protein Bcl‐2 and increasing the secretion levels of pro‐apoptosis proteins Bax, cytochrome c, caspase 9, caspase 3 and PARP. PQKPs also arrested the cell cycle at G0/G1 phase via remarkably reducing the protein levels of CDK4 and enhancing the protein levels of p53 and p21. HPLC‐MS/MS analysis identified nine peptides with molecular weights less than 1000 Da in PQKPs. Molecular docking results showed that TPGPPT and KGPAC identified from PQKPs could bind with p53 mutant and Bcl‐2 protein by conventional hydrogen bonds, carbon hydrogen bonds and van der Waals force. Furthermore, the anti‐proliferation impact of synthesized peptides (TPGPPT and KGPAC) was shown in MCF‐7 cells.CONCLUSIONThese findings indicated that PQKPs suppressed the proliferation of MCF‐7 breast cancer cells by triggering apoptosis and G0/G1 cell cycle arrest. Moreover, the outcome of this study will bring fresh insights into the production and application of animal byproducts.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

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Valuable stones: The trade in porcupine bezoars

Cited by 11 publications

References 28 publications

The illegal hunting and exploitation of porcupines for meat and medicine in Indonesia

The illegal hunting and exploitation of porcupines for meat and medicine in Indonesia

A guide to using the Internet to monitor and quantify the wildlife trade

Porcupine quills keratin peptides induces G0/G1 cell cycle arrest and apoptosis via p53/p21 pathway and caspase cascade reaction in MCF‐7 breast cancer cells

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