Wildlife Forensics: A Case Study on Golden Jackal Canis aureus in India Using Canid Head and Tailor-Made Musk Pod

The escalating trend of illegal trade on wildlife and wildlife products is a serious threat to existence of wildlife globally. Effective enforcement of laws to contain this requires accurate identification of the seizures which is often difficult due to fake lookalike articles. The articles thus pose challenging complexity and necessitate the usage of different approaches in identifying the species. Species identification by the use of molecular technology is widely recognized to be a definitive method. In this report, we describe the identification of seized canid head, suspected to be of jackal and a pod suspected to be of musk deer using the DNA-based approach. The mitochondrial regions of the query samples were amplified using ribosomal markers, 12S rRNA and 16S rRNA. The sequence reads were compared with the homologous hits extracted from the NCBI database. The phylogenetic analysis was carried out with the aligned sequences to identify species with 500 bootstrap replications. Based on the genetic analysis of both the seizures, the tested samples were identified to be belonging to the species ‘Golden Jackal’.