Characterising Wildlife Trade Market Supply-Demand Dynamics.

The trade in wildlife products can represent an important source of income for poor people, but also threaten wildlife locally, regionally and internationally. Bushmeat provides livelihoods for hunters, traders and sellers, protein to rural and urban consumers, and has depleted the populations of many tropical forest species. Management interventions can be targeted towards the consumers or suppliers of wildlife products. There has been a general assumption in the bushmeat literature that the urban trade is driven by consumer demand with hunters simply fulfilling this demand. Using the urban bushmeat trade in the city of Kumasi, Ghana, as a case study, we use a range of datasets to explore the processes driving the urban bushmeat trade. We characterise the nature of supply and demand by explicitly considering three market attributes: resource condition, hunter behaviour, and consumer behaviour. Our results suggest that bushmeat resources around Kumasi are becoming increasingly depleted and are unable to meet demand, that hunters move in and out of the trade independently of price signals generated by the market, and that, for the Kumasi bushmeat system, consumption levels are driven not by consumer choice but by shortfalls in supply and consequent price responses. Together, these results indicate that supply-side processes dominate the urban bushmeat trade in Kumasi. This suggests that future management interventions should focus on changing hunter behaviour, although complementary interventions targeting consumer demand are also likely to be necessary in the long term. Our approach represents a structured and repeatable method to assessing market dynamics in information-poor systems. The findings serve as a caution against assuming that wildlife markets are demand driven, and highlight the value of characterising market dynamics to inform appropriate management.

Uncovering the fruit bat bushmeat commodity chain and the true extent of fruit bat hunting in Ghana, West Africa.

Harvesting, consumption and trade of bushmeat are important causes of both biodiversity loss and potential zoonotic disease emergence. In order to identify possible ways to mitigate these threats, it is essential to improve our understanding of the mechanisms by which bushmeat gets from the site of capture to the consumer's table. In this paper we highlight the previously unrecognized scale of hunting of the African straw-colored fruit bat, Eidolon helvum, a species which is important in both ecological and public health contexts, and describe the commodity chain in southern Ghana for its trade. Based on interviews with 551 Ghanaians, including bat hunters, vendors and consumers, we estimate that a minimum of 128,000 E. helvum bats are sold each year through a commodity chain stretching up to 400 km and involving multiple vendors. Unlike the general bushmeat trade in Ghana, where animals are sold in both specialized bushmeat markets and in restaurants, E. helvum is sold primarily in marketplaces; many bats are also kept by hunters for personal consumption. The offtake estimated in this paper raises serious conservation concerns, while the commodity chain identified in this study may offer possible points for management intervention. The separation of the E. helvum commodity chain from that of other bushmeat highlights the need for species-specific research in this area, particularly for bats, whose status as bushmeat is largely unknown.

Ticks associated with wild mammals in Ghana.

The host ranges of a collection of 21 tick species found on wild mammals in the savanna, forests and coastal zone of Ghana suggested that most species were adapted to feeding mainly on host species within a single mammalian order, i.e. on artiodactyls (bovids/suids), carnivores, rodents or pholidotes (pangolins). Only a few species were dispersed evenly across a range of orders. Seven out of ten of the most common ticks on forest mammals were significantly associated with a particular host species or a group of closely related host species, which could be viewed as their major host or hosts, but they were also recorded much less frequently on a wide range of host species. Two other species were confined to their major hosts. Only one species appeared to be widely dispersed on forest mammals and to lack a particular major host. The majority of tick species therefore occurred on hosts with very distinctive biological, behavioural and ecological characteristics. The study provided no evidence to support the view that host specificity is an artefact of sampling. Finding that the tick species on Ghanaian wild mammals occurred on particular hosts, as well as in distinct habitats, indicated that tick-host associations are important for tick survival and confirmed the importance of climate and vegetation in tick distribution.

An updated list of the ticks of Ghana and an assessment of the distribution of the ticks of Ghanaian wild mammals in different vegetation zones.

Twenty one species of ticks belonging to five genera of the family Ixodidae (Order Acari, sub-order Ixodida) - Amblyomma, Haemaphysalis, Hyalomma, Ixodes and Rhipicephalus (including the sub-genus Rhipicephalus (Boophilus)) - were collected from 1260 mammals, representing 29 species, 14 families and 6 orders, in four vegetation zones in Ghana during the period 1971-1978. Four other species were collected from humans in 1977. In all, eight species appeared to be new records for Ghana: Amblyomma tholloni Neumann; Dermacentor circumguttatus Neumann; Haemaphysalis houyi Nuttall & Warburton; Ixodes loveridgei Arthur; Ixodes oldi Nuttall; Ixodes vanidicus Schultze; Rhipicephalus complanatus Neumann; Rhipicephalus cuspidatus Neumann. The updated list of tick species in Ghana given here includes 41 species of ixodid ticks and four species of argasid ticks. Most species have been found in neighbouring regions of West Africa but 56 of the 121 different combinations of ixodid tick species and host species found in the collection described here have not apparently been reported before. The new combinations recorded here bring the total number of different combinations of ixodid tick species and mammalian host species now reported in Ghana to 151. The tick species found on wild mammals in Ghana mostly differed from those reported from domestic stock by other authors. The data showed that different tick species occurred in different vegetation zones and that most species displayed a pronounced preference for certain groups of related host species. Some tick species were found in the savanna feeding mainly on large bovids and/or suids; others were found in forests feeding mainly on small bovids, large rodents or small carnivores.