School of Engineering, Westlake University, 18 Shilongshan Road, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, 310024, China.
School of Life Sciences, Westlake University, 18 Shilongshan Road, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, 310024, China.
Conserv Biol. 2021 Apr;35(2):452-459. doi: 10.1111/cobi.13703. Epub 2021 Mar 22.
Wildlife provides food, medicine, clothing, and other necessities for humans, but overexploitation can disrupt the sustainability of wildlife resources and severely threaten global biodiversity. Understanding the characteristics of consumer behavior is helpful for wildlife managers and policy makers, but the traditional survey methods are laborious and time-consuming. In contrast, culturomics may more efficiently identify the features of wildlife consumption. As a case study of the culturomics approach, we examined tiger bone wine consumption in China based on social media and Baidu search engine data. Tiger bone wine is one of the most purchased tiger products; its consumption is closely related to tiger poaching, which greatly threatens wild tiger survival. We searched a popular social media website for the term "tiger bone wine" and focused on posts that were originally created from 1 January 2012 to 31 December 2018. We filtered and classified posts related to the purchase, sale, or consumption of tiger bone wine and extracted information on providers, consumption motivations, year of production, and place of origin of the tiger bone wines based on the texts and photos of these posts. We found 756 posts related to tiger bone wine consumption, 113 of which mentioned providers of tiger bone wine, including friends (53%), elder relatives (37%), peer relatives (7%), and others (3%). Out of the 756 posts, 266 indicated the motivations of tiger bone wine consumption. Tiger bone wines were consumed as a tonic (34%), medicine (23%), game product (30%), and a symbol of wealth (28%). Some posts indicated ≥2 consumption motivations. These findings were consistent with the search queries from Baidu index. Such information could help develop targeted strategies for tiger conservation. The culturomics approach illustrated by our study is a rapid and cost-efficient way to characterize wildlife consumption.
野生动物为人类提供食物、药品、衣物和其他必需品，但过度开发会破坏野生动物资源的可持续性，严重威胁全球生物多样性。了解消费者行为特征有助于野生动物管理者和政策制定者，但传统的调查方法既费力又耗时。相比之下，文化组学可能更有效地识别野生动物消费的特征。作为文化组学方法的案例研究，我们根据社交媒体和百度搜索引擎数据，研究了中国虎骨酒的消费情况。虎骨酒是最受欢迎的虎制品之一，其消费与偷猎老虎密切相关，这极大地威胁了野生老虎的生存。我们在一个受欢迎的社交媒体网站上搜索了“虎骨酒”一词，并重点关注了 2012 年 1 月 1 日至 2018 年 12 月 31 日期间发布的原创帖子。我们筛选并分类了与购买、销售或消费虎骨酒有关的帖子，并根据这些帖子的文本和照片，提取了虎骨酒提供者、消费动机、生产日期和产地的信息。我们发现了 756 篇与虎骨酒消费有关的帖子，其中 113 篇提到了虎骨酒的提供者，包括朋友（53%）、长辈亲属（37%）、平辈亲属（7%）和其他人（3%）。在这 756 篇帖子中，有 266 篇提到了虎骨酒消费的动机。虎骨酒被作为补品（34%）、药品（23%）、野味产品（30%）和财富象征（28%）消费。有些帖子则表明有≥2 种消费动机。这些发现与百度指数的搜索查询结果一致。这些信息可以帮助制定有针对性的老虎保护策略。本研究展示的文化组学方法是一种快速、高效的特征描述野生动物消费的方法。
