The trade in illegal wildlife is a $19 billion annual business with ties to the Russian mob and Islamic extremists, and there’s one place the world turns to investigate the crime: a federal forensics lab (and curiosity cabinet) in a hippie town in Oregon.

At about 12:45 a.m. on April 10, 2013, a man named Song Shen Zhen entered the United States from Mexico at the border crossing in downtown Calexico, Calif. Zhen, a 73-year-old resident of Calexico, told inspectors that he had nothing to declare, but when a customs officer looked in Zhen’s car, he noticed an unusual bulge on the vehicle’s rear floor. The officer removed the floor mats and discovered two plastic grocery bags stuffed with more than two dozen pieces of what appeared to be dehydrated fish. Zhen was permitted to leave the port of entry, but Homeland Security agents kept him under surveillance, tailing him to his house, which they eventually obtained a warrant to search. Inside, on floors covered with cardboard, they found hundreds of pieces of fish like the ones Zhen had carried across the border, lined up in neat rows to dry, with electric fans arranged to blow air across them. According to the criminal complaint filed against Zhen in United States District Court, Southern District of California, the residence “appeared to be set up as a … factory,” a smuggling drop-house dedicated to the drying and packaging of valuable contraband: the swim bladders of a fish called the totoaba.

The totoaba macdonaldi is a marine fish found only in the Gulf of California in Mexico. It can grow to lengths of more than six feet and weigh as much as 220 pounds. It’s the largest species within the family Sciaenidae, commonly called “drums” or “croakers” because of the vibrations produced by muscles surrounding their swim bladders, gas-filled sacs that regulate the fishes’ buoyancy.

Swim bladders are also a highly prized delicacy. In China, dried swim bladders are known as fish maw, the main ingredient in soups and stews reputed to aid fertility, improve circulation and eradicate skin conditions. Commercial totoaba fishing in the Gulf of California peaked in the mid-1940s, after the arrival of Chinese immigrant field laborers in the border city of Mexicali opened a boom market for fish maw. Often, fishermen would slice open the totoaba, remove the swim bladders, and leave the carcasses in heaping piles to rot on the seashore. Overfishing contributed to a dramatic decline in the totoaba population, and in 1976, the fish was added to the list of most protected species covered by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an agreement signed by 180 nations, including the United States and Mexico.

But a black market in totoaba swim bladders has flourished. Today, the trade is largely transnational: Poachers catch the fish in Mexico and smuggle the bladders into the United States, where they can be ferried on direct flights to the Far East. In China, a single totoaba swim bladder can fetch as much as $10,000. The 240 bladders seized from the Calexico house, if sold abroad, “could conservatively be worth $3.6 million,” according to agents. Zhen’s intention, they say, was to send the valuable haul into China and Hong Kong.

Instead, the bladders were placed in ice-packed coolers and overnighted 900 miles north to the loading dock of a building just east of downtown Ashland, Ore. From the outside, the place doesn’t look like much. It’s a low-slung glass and concrete pile, set back from the road behind some drab landscaping. It could be mistaken for a small office park, or an administrative building at the neighboring Southern Oregon University. In fact, it’s home to one of the most unique law enforcement institutions in the United States, or anywhere else: the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Forensics Laboratory, the world’s only full-service science lab devoted to crimes against wildlife.

The lab has been described as “Scotland Yard for animals” and ” ‘CSI’ meets ‘Doctor Dolittle.’ ” A more accurate comparison might be to the midcentury Bell Labs or to the Sandia National Laboratories. It is a hotbed of research, discovery and innovation. It’s a center of cutting-edge science that does double duty as a makeshift natural history museum. It’s also a crime lab — the place to turn to when you’ve collared a perp whose victims are Mexican fish. “We’re proud of what we’ve got going here,” said Ken Goddard, the lab’s director. “It’s a pretty neat little operation.”

The building sprawls out across 40,000 square feet of office space and laboratories, which are divided into five units: chemistry, criminalistics, genetics, morphology and pathology. The lab boasts 29 full-time employees, 19 of them scientists, and lots of state-of-the-art machines. There are electron microscopes and mass spectrometers. There is a vacuum metal deposition chamber: a barrel-shaped contraption that reveals negative-image fingerprints. The criminalistics unit has a test-fire tank, an 8-foot-long container filled with water, into which bullets are fired and retrieved for ballistics research. Behind the tank are a series of three free-standing walls — made of Kevlar, brick and stainless steel — that are designed to stop an errant gunshot. “You’ve gotta be paranoid,” said Goddard. “Every crime lab I’ve been to, their ballistics test-fire room has at least one bullet hole in the wall.”

It was an afternoon in late May. Goddard led a visitor past a row of genetics labs where more than 60,000 DNA samples are stored. He stopped in a narrow corridor, opening the door to a walk-in freezer where containers sat on rows of storage shelving. The signs on the boxes said: “Caution: Venomous snakes!” “Herps ready for tanning,” “Small critters ready for bugs.” Across the hall from the freezer, in a sealed room visible through a picture window, insects could be seen swarming over heaps of flesh and bone contained in plexiglass chambers. It was the domain of the lab’s most prodigious workers: a colony of dermestids, flesh-eating beetles that are deployed to “skeletonize” bird and mammal carcasses, so the bones can be examined as evidence or added to the lab’s standards collection. “They’re Mother Nature’s cleanup crew,” Goddard said.

Goddard, 68, began his career in Southern California, working as a crime-scene investigator. In the late 1970s, Fish and Wildlife Service agents realized they needed a laboratory to analyze their evidence. (“F.B.I. wouldn’t do it,” Goddard recalled. “They said, ‘Be serious. We’re gonna work a deer case?’ “) Goddard was hired to get the operation off the ground. After years of bureaucratic haggling, the lab opened in July 1989.

Ashland is an unlikely spot for a federal crime lab. It’s a small city tucked in amid the rolling foothills and orchards of southern Oregon wine country, about 15 miles north of the California border. Ashland is known for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and for the whiff of patchouli that hangs over its picturesque streets. On the main drag, there are vegan-friendly eateries and stores like Soundpeace, which sells crystals, tarot cards and other “spirited gifts.” The town is home to some 20,000 residents and, it seems reasonable to surmise, exactly twice that many Birkenstock sandals. “Ashland’s very hippie, very liberal, so we’re a bit of an oddity,” says Ed Espinoza, a chemist and the F.W.S. Forensics Lab’s deputy director. “We’re law enforcement, straight down the line. But we’re law enforcement for a good cause, as the community here would see it. The bad guys that we’re chasing are damaging the environment.”

Wildlife crime has grown to a $19 billion dollar annual global trade, according to a report released last year by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, a conservation nonprofit. The black market in wildlife parts and products is the fourth-largest illegal industry worldwide, behind narcotics, counterfeiting and human trafficking, and it may well outstrip other illicit enterprises in terms of the variety of crimes and the complexities they pose for law enforcement. The wildlife trade encompasses culinary delicacies and Asian medicines, pets and hunting trophies, clothing and jewelry. It takes in commodities such as elephant ivory, rhinoceros horn, bushmeat, the shells of giant tortoises, the pelts of big-game cats. The environmental and social costs of the trade are grave. Wildlife crime is contributing to the erosion of natural resources and the spread of infectious diseases; it is providing robust new revenue streams for criminal syndicates and even terrorists. In a July 2013 executive order enhancing United States government coordination to combat wildlife crime, President Obama deemed the surge in poaching and trafficking an “international crisis” that is “fueling instability and undermining security.”

The Ashland lab occupies a front line in this global struggle. Over the years, its researchers have done groundbreaking work, advancing science while arming law enforcement with crucial crime-fighting tools. Scientists at the lab discovered ways of extracting DNA from the leather in a handbag; they’ve successfully lifted fingerprints from objects that have been submerged in saltwater. In the 1990s, the lab pioneered a method of obtaining genetic information from a single fish egg, an innovation that helped foil caviar smugglers. It developed new techniques in ivory morphology to combat traffickers of elephant tusks. The impact of this work has reverberated far from Ashland. Bureaucratically, the lab is an oddity. It is a United States federal government institution; it’s also the official crime lab for the 180 nations that are parties to the CITES agreement. Effectively, it is the world’s wildlife forensics lab.

The scope of the lab’s reach is on view in the place where the casework begins: the evidence control area. Each day, the mail is unpacked by the lab’s evidence handlers, and they have seen just about everything: poisoned bald eagles; a panther riddled with bullet wounds; 78 elephant tusks, poached in Africa and seized in Singapore; a rotting python corpse, coiled like a firehose and folded into a cooler. Two shipments in the spring of 2010 brought more than 200 pelicans: victims of the BP oil spill. The lab treated all the pelicans as separate homicide cases, extracting fluid from each bird’s lungs, which was matched by United States Coast Guard investigators to the oil that gushed from a well drilled by BP’s ill-fated Deepwater Horizon rig.

On a recent morning, a cooler arrived bearing the frozen remains of a Mexican gray wolf. The badly decomposed carcass was thawed out and then placed on the slab in the pathology unit, where a necropsy was conducted by Rebecca Kagan, a veterinary pathologist. “It’s been maggot-scavenged, there’s not much left in there,” Kagan said. “But here’s a hole, a bloody hole. And here’s another nice little wound path going all the way through.” X-rays showed trace metal in the wolf’s chest — bullet fragments, in all likelihood — which Kagan dug out to pass along to the criminalistics unit for analysis.

The wolf case was straightforward. But wildlife crime brings novel challenges to the work of forensics. The task of forensic scientists is to examine evidence in an effort to connect victim, crime scene and suspect. A traditional forensic investigation begins with a classic question: Whodunit? At the Ashland lab, the mystery is often more fundamental: What is it? Evidence in wildlife cases frequently appears in states of decay or in unidentified parts. The first step is to make the ID: to determine what exactly the evidence is and if it belongs to a species that is protected by law.

The swim bladders seized in the Calexico raid are a case in point. To a specialist’s trained eye, a totoaba bladder is easy to spot: It has distinctive curled tubules running along its base. But smugglers have learned to disguise the evidence, trimming away the tubules to pass off totoaba bladders as those of a non-CITES-protected fish. At the Ashland lab, researchers have developed a mitochondrial genetic sequence for the totoaba — a DNA pattern that distinguishes the fish from the next closest species. When the bladders in the Zhen case arrived in Ashland, scientists snipped off small pieces of tissue and “busted open” their cells to extract the mitochondrial DNA. The tests confirmed that the swim bladders were indeed from totoaba: smoking gun evidence for the prosecution of Song Shen Zhen.

Not all cases can be made with genetics, though. The CITES treaty accords endangered or threatened status to more than 35,000 animals and plant species, and the lab’s morphology unit has assembled a massive collection of standards, samples of protected species to use as points of comparison in casework. The goal is comprehensiveness: to build a storehouse, Goddard said drily, of “everything on the planet.”

The collection isn’t there yet. But the Ashland lab is something to behold: a gigantic curiosity cabinet that might have been art-directed by Wes Anderson. Shelves and glass cases hold an improbable array of bones, feathers, horns, hides. There are narwhal tusks and emu feet and monkey paws; there are drawers filled with severed heads of antelopes and the rainbow plumage of tropical birds. Everywhere, there’s taxidermy: stuffed birds and reptiles and jungle cats, with faces frozen in fierce grimaces. On one cabinet, a lab worker has stuck a pink Post-it note with a message scrawled in black marker: “Lions only please. Tigers in cabinet below.”

It’s an eye-popping spectacle. It’s also depressing, a reminder of the recklessness and ruthlessness with which humankind exercises dominion over nature. Displayed in various corners of the morphology unit are the lab’s “shop of horrors,” macabre trophies fashioned from animal parts. Goddard pointed out cowboy boots crowned with cobra heads, a ceramic mug that sits atop two goose feet, a cane toad that has been converted into a change purse, with a zipper running the length of its body. Sitting nearby was Pepper Trail, the lab’s senior ornithologist. “Birders keep ‘life lists’ of all the birds they’ve seen in their life,” Trail said. “I’m in the melancholy position of having a ‘death list’ of all the birds I’ve identified dead. It’s over 600 species.”

Once, wildlife crime was a marginal issue. As recently as a decade ago, the wildlife police blotter was dominated by crimes of opportunity and one-offs: by hunters who would gun down elks so they could hang antlers in the den. Today, wildlife trafficking is a sophisticated international enterprise, with low risks and high profits drawing in organized crime: Russian mobsters, Irish crime families, extremist organizations like Darfur’s janjaweed militias and Somalia’s Al Shabab, a terror group with ties to Al Qaeda.

These developments are putting wildlife crime on the agendas of policymakers and adding urgency to the efforts of the Ashland scientists. Recently, Ed Espinoza has been spending a lot of time thinking about wood. The illicit timber trade — the logging and trafficking of precious hardwoods from forests in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America — is a multibillion dollar industry. The huge profits have attracted violent criminal gangs, who are destabilizing the already precarious rule of law in developing countries. For law enforcement, the timber trade poses a vexing problem. Smugglers typically ship timber after it’s been milled, a process that obliterates morphological markers. How can illegal logging be stymied if the authorities are unable to distinguish legitimate wood products from contraband?

At the Ashland lab, Espinoza has come up with a solution, employing a sophisticated mass spectrometry device with an unwieldy name, the AccuTOF-DART (Time of Flight-Direct Analysis in Real Time). The lab acquired the AccuTOF-DART a few years ago to aid its work in rhino horn cases, but Espinoza has been using it to measure the chemical composition of wood with more precision than was previously possible. At the lab, Espinoza demonstrated the technique. Using a tweezer, he took a sliver of agarwood — a hardwood used in incense and fragrances that can run upward of $25,000 per kilo — and held it in front of a small blue cylinder on the AccuTOF-DART. The cylinder shot out a superheated gust of protonated helium, with a temperature of 842 degrees, which stripped a layer of molecules from the surface of the wood. The molecules were sucked into the AccuTOF-DART, and the machine generated a series of readings of their molecular weight and chemical composition. This data allows Espinoza to identify the wood’s species and, in certain cases, its geographic provenance — to precisely pinpoint what the wood is and where it comes from.

“I came here because I was looking for a job,” Espinoza says. “I was interested more in human forensics because I thought that that’s where it was at. That was in 1989 — I’ve been here ever since. You see, wildlife is where the interesting research problems are.”