Barcoding and traditional health practitioner perspectives are
informative to monitor and conserve frogs and reptiles traded for
traditional medicine in urban South Africa
Abstract
Published literature suggests that indigenous cultural practices,
specifically traditional medicine, are commonplace among urban
communities contrary to the general conception that such practices are
associated to rural societies. We reviewed literature for records of
herptiles sold by traditional health practitioners in urban South
Africa, then used visual confirmation surveys, DNA barcoding, and folk
taxonomy to identify the herptile species that were on sale.
Additionally, interviews with 11 SePedi and IsiZulu speaking traditional
health practitioners were used to document details of the collection and
pricing of herptile specimens along with the practitioners’ views of
current conservation measures aimed at traditional medicine markets. The
herptile specimens sold by traditional health practitioners included
endangered and non-native species. The absorbance ratios of DNA
extracted from the tissue of herptiles used in traditional medicine were
found to be unreliable predictors of whether those extractions would be
suitable for downstream applications. From an initial set of 111 tissue
samples, 81 sequencing reactions were successful and 55 of the obtained
sequences had species level matches to COI reference sequences on the
NCBI GenBank and/or BOLD databases. Molecular identification revealed
that traditional health practitioners sometimes mislabel the species
they use. The mixed methodology employed here is useful for conservation
planning as it updates knowledge of animal use in indigenous remedies
and can accurately identify species of high conservation priority.
Furthermore, the study highlights the possibility of collaborative
conservation planning with traditional health practitioners.