Providing Maine Wardens with New Forensic Tools

Maine Wardens face difficult challenges in gathering proof of infractions that will stand up in court. For example, how can you prove that the meat in someone's freezer came from more than one animal, or that it came from a doe when the hunter had no doe permit? How can you prove that a spot of blood on a pair of coveralls came from a deer taken out of season, or from a moose when the wearer had no permit? A few years ago, you couldn't. Today, thanks to the Wildlife Forensics Lab at the University of Maine, Maine Wardens have tools that help them to identify the sex of deer or moose, whether parts of more than one animal are present in a sample, and even, to some extent, what part of the state a deer came from. This information has helped to make prosecutions more efficient, and in some cases, to establish innocence. Now Dr. Irv Kornfield of the University of Maine, working cooperatively with the Warden Service under a grant from the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, is establishing a baseline reference set of genetic markers in deer. Wardens took samples from tagged deer during hunting season and the lab is in the process of analyzing the DNA from those samples to establish whether there is an individual DNA profile for each individual animal. With a broad database of genetic markers, wardens will be able to know with a greater degree of accuracy whether a particular deer sample is from a particular animal. In addition, because deer in Maine seem to have different genetic markers in different parts of the state, it will be possible to establish that a sample from a deer found in someone's possession in, for example, York County, probably came from Aroostook County, or vice versa. Maine's lab is the only one of its kind in the Northeast and Dr. Kornfield hopes in time to extend its work to serve wardens in other states as well.