The Background: A lot of work, time, and dedication goes into creating a scientific wildlife study. Proposals are made, adjusted, refined. Grants are applied for. Then the exciting moment when it all comes together. A team of researchers assembled their tools, bought their plane tickets, got their visas to Madagascar, arranged room and board, contracted with a licensed veterinarian, and got to work. Their mission? Collect samples from endangered lemurs to bring to the lab back in the United States.
So far, so good. They ethically detained, collected samples, and released. They documented the animals extensively: sex, weight, estimated age, photograph, observable health. The perishable specimens were packed properly for storage, and ultimately for shipping. As the collection phase came to an end, now they needed a CITES permit to bring it all home with them.
They knew lemurs, as endangered animals, fall under the CITES 1 designation. They knew the samples, being perishable, have a 24 hour window for shipping and customs clearance through Fish & Wildlife. And they knew that these permits are like a passport for the items they’re attached to—you can’t send the CITES ahead. The permit had to be verified, signed and stamped in Madagascar, accompany the specimens to the US, and then be checked for compliance when they arrived. And here’s where things went terminally wrong.
The Issue: Once the permits were signed in Madagascar, the clock was ticking. Somebody on the team had made a natural, but project-killing mistake: they had listed all the biological categories of the samples. What they didn’t know was that only some kinds of specimens are covered by CITES permits. They thought that by listing them all, they were covering their bases. Instead, heartbreakingly, they invalidated the permits, causing the shipment to get seized.
Here’s the thing. Fish & Wildlife always want a successful, smooth permit clearance. If the CITES permits were done right, the agents would have cleared the lemur specimens in about three hours. They want to spend their time catching smugglers and other criminals. But the filter for them to do this is permit compliance. In the case of the lemurs, the agents were gutted. They didn’t want the team to fail, but they, too, have to comply with, and enforce federal law. So the specimens were seized, put in freezer storage, and agents alerted the research team that the CITES was invalid. And that blew through the 24 hour perishable period.
The Outcome: In the end, the restricted specimens were lost. The team had to pay storage costs, and pay a third-party representative to go to the receiving port, and carefully salvage the unrestricted specimens, arranging with a federal agent to oversee the process. All that work, all that time and tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars of grant money for nothing.
Was there no way to recover from this disaster? Hypothetically, once it was seized, they could contact Fish & Wildlife headquarters and make their case. Headquarters could contact Madagascar customs and verify the whole chain of custody. Meanwhile, the specimens would be sitting in a chest freezer in customs. So say this worked, say the research team was astonishingly lucky, they’ve scrambled, made dozens of last-ditch phone calls, and against all odds, managed to get the ok while the specimens were still within the expiration window. Say they claim them from customs, speed to the lab, put them safely in the deep freeze, and go out to celebrate. On Monday, they begin months of labwork, and eventually publish their findings.
Now imagine a year later, a new research project begins, and the first thing they do is look at the published data. The new team realizes that the original lemur sample shipment was seized and went into a communal, non-laboratory freezer. Fish and Wildlife will keep it cold, but they’re not a dedicated lab storage facility. They can’t guarantee the samples didn’t intermingle with other seized materials. So the study is completely discredited. All the data, and the conclusions, are unreliable. The journal issues a retraction. The authors, the original team, take a major career hit, one that will follow them for years. Funding, a risky and competitive pursuit at the best of times, dries up. Because going through with the study reflects badly on the lab, pretty soon that closes too. So yes, even if it seemed like a last minute reprieve, once the lemur samples were seized, it was all over for this project.
How we could have helped: It’s a lot to expect of a lab researcher to know what to put—and what not to put—on the CITES permit. An expert in lemurs is not the same as an expert in wildlife customs import. But the reverse is true, too, we may not be lemur research experts, but we are experts in CITES compliance. With a six-day window Document Check, which happens one week up to the final 24 hours before shipping, we would have alerted the lemur team in time for them to amend the permits, or to reschedule shipping. With our Consulting Package, we would have worked with the team from the beginning, or even once they were in Madagascar, customizing checklists, warning them of potential pitfalls, and making sure they had the knowledge and resources they needed.