The Rhisotope Project: Insertion of radioisotopes into live rhinoceros
wits.ac.za
wits.ac.za
By comparison, infusion which puts a dye and an anti-consumption toxin in the horns to render the ivory worthless and thus prevent the animals from being killed in the first place is a well developed and inexpensive process that has proven effective.[0] I don't see how radioisotope injection is an improvement.
I’m not sure those exist, but sounds like something you want to scan for on the borderline
[1] https://www.extremetech.com/science/scientists-turn-to-radio...
Reminds me of one of the worst "abolish the Police" arguments: By the time you put a murderer in jail, the victim is already dead.
I know nothing of that market though, could be entirely wrong
And feathers, turtle shell, but they are made or another type of keratin.
To be honest, each the keratin of each animal is slightly different, with small changes of the composition, something like plastic that can be made softer or harder tweaking the compostition.
Anyway, I guess it's not about the exact composition, but the "magic" part of the rhino horn.
Keratin is readily available and cheap
Here's 50g of it on Amazon for $16: https://www.amazon.com/Myoc-Keratin-Powder-Conditioner-Produ...
And you can get it from chemical manufacturers in purer forms for much more expensive but that's true for any high grade chemical.
In fact, if we type your question into Google we find this 2019 article that even references a 2015 article about attempts to do exactly that: https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/22723289/3d-printed-rhino-...
I highly suggest googling solutions that you think are rather obvious. It can often lead to surprising results as things can interestingly become complex. And at the worst case, you find that your idea works and you can throw in a citation to give your proposition more weight. Seems like a win win to me and at very little cost in time.
From the article:
> …will closely monitor the health and vital statistics of the rhinos over a period of six months, in order to determine the viability of this approach.
If this approach is shown to be healthy, I’m sure it could be done much faster.
But seriously, S-curves aren't just about how the middle part looks exponential. Both ends are slow. Slow to start and slow to end. When technology B replaces technology A it is (almost) always WORSE than technology A initially. The difference is that its theoretical maximum is higher. Because guess what? In the long run if you stack a bunch of S-curves together, you get an exponential curve. And this is how so much technology has improved, including transistors, solar, batteries, and so on. Sometimes this slow start can be on the order of decades! The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X (1983) wasn't "a failure," it was a step to the IBM Simon (1992) which was a step to the iPhone (2007).
So if you're exclusively chasing things that are better *now*, you won't make any progress. You have to invest.
Sounds like there is some inherent difficulty requiring years of meticulous and dedicated hard work to insert doses into 20 live rhinoceroses.
Or the other way: If it really took three years to tag 20 rhinos with everything working at full speed, don't you think the University and the researches themselves would be the first to realize this is impracticle? Don't you think the journal reviewers would point this out?
Yeah honestly (as an academic; on applied side), when I saw "3 years" my first thought was "wow that's fast." And the second one was "was that just to get approval or is that they've had the device in the rhino 0-3 years and are testing how effective their methods are at staying in and not doing long term damage to the animal?" Because the latter question I can see taking even longer. Though they say a rhino is poached every 20 hrs, so I think there's probably some urgency to the matter where 3 years of testing is good enough.
> Don't you think the journal reviewers would point this out?
Well... I also don't have faith in journal reviewers so who the fuck knows.
I'm not quite convinced of this. If you watch the video in the article they demonstrate the procedure. Considering that they typically paint the rhino's horns with substances to make them undesirable to poachers, they clearly have the capacity to subdue and restrain the rhino already. And in the video they show a person using a standard hand drill, who drills into the rhino. You can see this at 0:20 and them insert the device at 0:34, where just after they show another horn being drilled into. And they do it several times throughout the video while the narrator explains the process.
I suspect that the 3 years is far less due to the actual "installing" it into the rhino (as it looks like once subdued the process is really <15 minutes...) but rather to things like regulation and determining the nuances like "how many isotopes do we need" (clearly more than one), "what types of radiation are more detectable?" "what levels of radiation will sustain and be detectable when transporting horns across international airports?", "Are we causing harm to the rhinos through the radiation?", "does the radiation leech into the rhino's body, such that while the device is safe inside the horn it would be harmful," "how often does that happen, especially given when they fight?", "do the devices stay in place for sustained periods of time?" and so on. There's quite a lot of important questions and many I'm sure that an actual expert in this could ask, but I'm nowhere near a rhino expert (or even enthusiast) [though am experienced with radiation technologies] and I have a bunch of questions that would reasonably take years to adequately answer.
It isn't "ah fuck, rhinos are so hard to catch that we're only able to catch one every 2 months" but "okay, we've installed these devices in 5 rhinos, are they still there 3 years later?" and "oh fuck, that type of glue and that drilling depth didn't work because we lost 10 devices in the first year. Time to update our methodology."
I find these kinds of questions magnitudes more likely than the explanation that they couldn't catch 20 rhinos and drill into their horns. Especially given what can be seen in the video about how the rhinos act.
I didn’t realize this. Injecting small, safe radioactive material into rhino horns seems like an incredibly good hack: turn all that nuclear monitoring equipment into poached animal artifact detectors.
There's definite a positive (non-zero) threshold below which it doesn't trigger.
Bananas are radioactive, and while a single banana doesn't trigger the alarms, a lot of bananas might!
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose
> Although the amount in a single banana is small in environmental and medical terms, the radioactivity from a truckload of bananas is capable of causing a false alarm when passed through a Radiation Portal Monitor used to detect possible smuggling of nuclear material at U.S. ports.
Because that's what the horn-smugglers will be carrying in attempts to deflect why the airport scanner is detecting radiation in their luggage.
Also, each radioactive source produce radioactivity with different energy, so you can use specialized equipment to identify the source. (We used one in the lab in an undergraduate couse of Physics. It's not very big, like the size of a shoe.)
If it was you wouldn’t see bananas at the supermarket
Besides - they worked on this for three years. They likely thought this through beyond banana comparisons…
Radiation portal monitors will not detect all quantities and there are simple techniques for masking these detections with sheilding, or via nuisance alarms if they are detected. [1]
Shark fin extraction, for shark fin soup, has a similar cultural problem. Influential people in the communities that consume these products, ie Yao Ming, could make a lot more progress by simply having public campaigns against it. [2]
[1] Source: me, I am a radation detecion PhD who works on similar kinds of problems, with similarly or more capable systems. [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJG7RaLX-DM
Having portal monitors that serve many purposes is good, and generally the biggest impact they have is in the deterrence effect, ie bad actors might be constrained by their existence. However in order for deterrence to be effective it must be a credible capability. Since there are so many smugglers, and they could reasonably implement simple countermeasures, it is likely the deterrence effect is small to nil in this case.
A big celeb getting caught doing something gauche and getting dogpiled in the press? That is what effective deterrent looks like.
> Rhino horns are used for their "traditional" medicine ingredients
The "product" is ruined.
Smugglers would likely be able to use simple, cheap detectors to remove these.
Potentially they don't remove the pils, simply grind the horn + source into medicine... the amount of radiation will not cause acute effects to the person who ingests it and will likely just cause some "unexplainable" tumor or system failure later in life or after a prolonged consumption.
If you just insert a capsule of radioactive material, it's easy to make it (extremely) poisonous, easily detectable and harmless to the rhino. But I don't see a way to do all three at once.
If you just wanted to kill the consumers a small amount of an alpha emitter would work quite well, but would be hard to detect and carry a small amount of risk to the rhino if it breaks confinement.
Conversely you could use a strong gamma emitter to make it easily detectable but I don't see a way to do so that would harm the consumers but not the rhino. Best you can do is some level or radioactivity that we're fine with in animals but not in humans because we're hypocrites.
I don't know if this is the case, but if the life expectancy of rhinos is much less than humans, then there would be radiation levels that are safe for the rhino but harmful for humans. Tumors can take time to develop.
Luckily this is easily obtainable information on the internet.
'Rhinoceroses’ lifespans vary on species. A rhino’s lifespan is typically 40 to 45 years."
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/blog/rhinoceros-fact-sheet/
That is less than a human lifespan but not by orders of magnitude smaller. Sounds like a very narrow needle to thread.
Making them radioactive with non-penetrating particles might be ok from the standpoint of trying to make them less desirable... but you aren't making them detectable & it is highly controversial to do this.
In reality, and back to the solutions proposed by the article: I don't know if the source article's idea has merit or is just funded by a non-profit where this is a small pet project or if they really don't understand the tradespace.
And if it’s eg 50%, I’d very much want to be in the injected 50% because all poaching effort would be in the non treated population. Obviously assuming all animals in an area were injected and that was known to poachers.
I’m also wondering where we’re getting the idea that it’s extremely toxic if ingested. Maybe it’s in the video? The article seems to suggest that it’s “non-toxic” and that
> “the inserted radioisotopes hold no health or any other risk for the animals or those who care for them.”
> "The radioactive dose makes the horn poisonous for humans"
> 'The radioactive material would "render the horn useless... essentially poisonous for human consumption" added Nithaya Chetty, professor and dean of science at [the University of the Witwatersrand]'
> Q: What if you drop the radioactive seed in the grass and cannot be found? And other animals accidentally ingest it?
> A: This is a highly unlikely scenario as specific standard operating procedures will be developed to ensure that no radioactive material will be left behind at the treatment site. Should an animal ingest some of the radioactive material subsequent to the initial treatment, the radioisotope will be of such a chemical and physical form that it will quickly pass through the bowels of the animal and be excreted out by that animal. The calculated doses will not do any significant harm.
Perhaps something significant happens when grinding up the radioisotope, but then again this would also happen when ingested by animals (grinding between teeth etc).
I think more than actual quantities involved, the scary risk of radiation, however unlikely, may be a bigger deterrent for the consumers of these products. The more widely this news spreads, the better it is for the Rhinos.
But the idea of the test is that this could be done in a wider scale. If a significant portion of horns are being confiscated (via radiation sensors) then there’s fewer horns being sold and less money available for all those middleman groups. Over time the market goes away.
Perhaps similar to how the market for stolen iPhones dried up once people could remotely brick their stole phone. There’s just less money to be made so thieves move on to more lucrative targets.
I can't find a reference, but that reminds me of an old project to dye rhino horns pink. Sadly, a few rhinos didn't survive the process.
I didn't know this statistic before - this is disheartening.
> current extinctions were ‘up to 100 times higher than the background rate.’
https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_d...
Unless it can completely stop poaching (which on its own I think is unlikely) I don't think it will solve the fundamental issue that drives poaching, that there is a market willing to pay exorbitant fees.
Ivory has zero physiological medicinal effects, but their rareness convinces certain kinds of (shithead) people that they "must". The rarer the material, the more "special" it becomes, driving up the price further and the higher the price, the more emboldened the poachers become.
A complementary strategy is to relentlessly name and shame the backward cultures that compose this shitheadedness.
So say it with me: Chinese* traditional medicine is backwards and primitive. Chinese ivory buyers are a shameful stain upon humanity.
* The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) reports that nearly all of the current demand for elephant ivory comes from the Chinese market. -https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/economics-...
Poachers are looking for a quick payday and having to do this would cost additional time & money that will drive them elsewhere.
Sort of like the adage of the best security is being less of a target / more of an annoyance to rob than your neighbor.
- poachers/smugglers would need to know about this before they get caught (doesn't save that rhino, but adds friction to smuggling and removes some smugglers/buyers - both the ones caught and the ones who quit because they're worried about it)
- testing for it likely requires non-trivial equipment (again adds friction to the trade)
- depending on how visible the hole is, accurately locating it inside the horn may not be trivial either
- once located, removing it still devalues the horn
Is that a typo? I'd think after 20 years we'd know if the plan worked.
I’d say unorthodox measures to curb poaching and trade are not uncalled for.
All the world's rhino horns put together are worth more than all the world's gold put together? All of Africa's rhino horns are worth more than all of Africa's gold? A single rhino horn is worth more than a single bar of gold? 1kg of gold? The same mass of gold? The same volume of gold?
It's like wondering whether gold is worth more than Microsoft by comparing an ounce of gold to a share of Microsoft. Or to an ounce of Microsoft share certificates!
The only sensible way to make the comparison is by total market cap. And I seriously doubt that rhino horns are worth more than 15 trillion USD.
From the perspective of smugglers and their stuff, that's about the worst possible comparison.
So much so that yours is literally the first time ever that I've heard anyone even suggest market cap for a smuggled substance; looking at the definition of that term, I don't think that term is, or even could be by analogy, meaningful in this context.
It's always money per mass, £$€ per imperial or metric, never anything else.
Comparison by weight is useful to give an idea of the price. It's just like measuring distances in football fields. Don't worry too much about that. Also, a cargo ship full of gold [2] is probably very valuable, but a magical cargo ship full of rhino horns will probably collapse the market and be worthless.
Here is a list of most expensive materials per weight https://brightside.me/articles/the-17-most-expensive-materia... it includes saffron and antimater that have a very short shelf life, a few radioactive things that are expensive only beacuse they are difficult to produce [3]. If I had to stock huge quantities, I'd be very conservative and store gold and platinium.
[1] Gold has a huge value per volume ratio. Toilete paper not.
[2] Assuming it doesn't sink.
[3] Aluminium used to be very expensive, until someone invented a method to make metalic aluminium easily.
When you go to the store you compare bananas by the size of the company that produced them? Or by the price per kg?
How is price per unit of mass not fundamental?
I refuse to believe that you are actually confused that one commodity costs more per gram than another one.
You are completely correct. While the statement is factually correct regarding the cost of rhino horn, it is completely meaningless information.
We may as well throw in the cost per gram of a heart transplant while we're at it.
I will say that annual demand is probably the more meaningful figure to work with, and it would be even more useful to express that in terms of "how many more years of this level of demand will lead to the extinction of rhinos."
~$400k/kg vs ~$75k/kg
Unless that's the case, which seems unlikely, all the gold is still worth more than all the rhino horns.
Also, gold's density is about 19 g/cm^3. I can't easily find a figure for rhino horns, but let's guess about the same as fingernails, horse's hooves, etc., which is about 1.25 g/cm^3. Gold is 15x denser, so at the prices you've shown, gold is still worth more than rhino horns per unit volume.
Because weight is the best way to compare things.
What are you trying to achieve by arguing that a common turn of phrase doesn't mean what everyone else thinks it means?
> These radioisotopes will provide an affordable, safe and easily applicable method
And
> After three years of meticulous and dedicated hard work [...] in collaboration with a team of experts who are leaders in the world of rhino conservation and veterinary work, will closely monitor the health and vital statistics of the rhinos [...]
Not sure why you want to just dismiss all that
1. Affordability and Ease of Application: The article states that the radioisotopes are intended to be an affordable and easily applicable method for marking rhino horns. This means that the technology, once developed and refined, can be applied to rhinos without significant cost or complexity. The goal is to make it practical for widespread use.
2. Three Years of Research and Expert Collaboration: The three years of research and the involvement of a team of experts highlight the rigorous development and testing phase needed to ensure the method's safety and effectiveness. This initial investment of time and expertise is necessary to create a robust, scientifically validated solution.
3. No Contradiction: The extensive research and expert collaboration do not contradict the claims of affordability and ease of application. Rather, they ensure that the final product is safe, effective, and ready for widespread, practical use. The upfront investment in research is typical for developing innovative technologies and does not imply that the method itself will be costly or complex to implement once it is ready.
4. Scaling Up: The project's next phase involves closely monitoring the rhinos to demonstrate the method's efficacy and safety. If successful, this proof of concept will pave the way for scaling up the application to more rhinos and potentially other endangered species. The affordability and ease of application refer to the potential widespread deployment after the initial research phase, not the development phase.
In summary, your confusion arises from conflating the initial research and development effort with the final application's intended affordability and practicality. The article suggests that after this rigorous development phase, the method will be straightforward and cost-effective to implement on a larger scale.
Was wondering what ChatGPT's answer would be to this comment chain. (Also mostly checked that what it claims about the article‘s content is correct)
If the dose is low enough (like a x-ray for a person per year) it's not a problem. If the dose is high it's dangerous. https://xkcd.com/radiation/
Also the horn is made of compressed hair. https://www.savetherhino.org/our-work/protecting-rhinos/what... So the local radioactivity is not a problem, you must calculate the distance to the head.
I assume the doses are small enough to be harmless.
https://www.thepioneerwoman.com/food-cooking/recipes/a11882/...