Helping create new methods to better detect illegally trafficked reptiles

“It sounds a bit American when I say that I grew up with the Crocodile Hunter,” admits PhD graduate Amber Brown.

“I had a poster of him on my wall. It was always a dream of mine to work with Australian reptiles.”

When Amber was young, it was normal for her to come home from school with frogs and lizards in her pockets, so it felt like a natural progression for a shingleback lizard to be at the centre of her PhD research decades later.

The shingleback’s biggest predator

The shingleback lizard is a stocky blue-tongue lizard found across the outback, from the Great Diving Range to the Indian Ocean. 

“They have the cutest faces and great personalities. And they're romantic! They’re monogamous, so

 generally during spring you'll find them in pairs. The males follow the female, making sure she's okay and letting her eat first.”

They’re also small and slow, which makes them easy prey for the global illegal animal trade.

Ripped from their natural habitat, the lizards are stored by poachers in metal boxes to avoid x-ray detection and exported around the world where they can retail anywhere between $3700 to 7000 USD, leaving behind devastating effects on the environment. 

“All animals serve a vital role in the ecosystem. If you remove one species, you could affect many species,” Amber explains. 

“When you affect many species, in the worst-case scenarios you can see a whole transformation of the environment.”

The ramifications don’t stop there. Transporting wild animals from their native environment to a new one also poses major biosecurity risks.

Sniffing out the problems

To stay ahead of the poachers and detect the lizards while they’re still alive, Amber and her supervisors

 from the Australian Museum and UTS decided to use another tool at their disposal: odours.

“Odour compounds are tiny, which means they can penetrate almost anything. So, you can put a shingleback lizard in a tin container, and it will mess up the x-ray, but you can still smell it.”

While detection dogs are highly effective in picking up odours, it’s difficult for their human colleagues to know whether they’re detecting a snake, turtle or lizard, and which containers they should be searching. Amber’s odour database aims to build the foundation for detecting illegally trafficked reptiles in transit. By understanding which odours are being released, she aims to identify specific odours that will allow for the quick and accurate detection of living trafficked reptiles.

The value of persistency

Starting from scratch, Amber had to first determine the best method to collect the odours, considering variations in species, gender, and even how long the animal had to sit in a box before it released the odour. She spent the first year of her PhD collecting odours from captive shinglebacks and analysing them in the lab, trying and testing again until she found the best instruments and methods to use. 

I had many late nights in the lab. But this is the kind of work that makes me happy. I really love to whittle away at the problem and try to get the best outcome that I can.”

Once the odour collection method was confirmed, the next step was to gather samples across the shingleback species to determine which odour compounds are important for detection. 

Researching in nature’s lab

“I spent close to a year in a tent or in the bush chasing shinglebacks around. It was the best experience.

I've always been very outdoorsy, and there were some periods where I didn't take a shower for two weeks and my hair was red with clay, but it was it was gorgeous. It was an opportunity to see all the different habitats of Australia.”

But nature is less controlled than the lab, relying on Amber’s ability to plan for all possible outcomes.

“We always had our satellite phone, a massive first aid kit, and enough water and food for two days just in case. Luckily, nothing bad happened, although we did have to outrun the bushfires and floods in 2019.

“Your PhD is always going to be challenging because you're going to have things that don't go your way. You’re going to have COVID, bushfires or instruments that break. You have to be persistent, especially working with wildlife, because wild animals are as picky as you and I. You could spend two weeks looking for your target animal and not find it and you have to be okay with that.”

What’s next?

With her PhD wrapped up, Amber is back in the United States, lecturing and working across several other animal welfare projects, including one that involves koala fingerprints.

But her research lives on at the Australian Museum and UTS.

“My research was just the tip of the iceberg. The method used to collect and analyse the lizards can be established across the reptile species to build a giant odour database.”

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