The international community took steps to protect two increasingly rare species this week, providing an important reminder that treating otters as pets harms the iconic animals in the wild.
In recent years Asia’s otters have been subject to intense poaching, primarily for their pelts. Markets in East Asia greatly value their smooth, dense, water-adapted fur. At same time the poaching of live otters for sale in the pet trade has become an emerging crisis. Even in Japan’s famous cat cafés, otters have proven to be attractive alternatives to felines. The small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinereus), with its charming reputation, is especially vulnerable to such trade.
This week the international community took a major step to support these otters. At the 18th Conference of the Parties of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the world’s governments voted overwhelmingly to apply their strongest level of protection to both the small-clawed and smooth-coated otters (Lutrogale perspicillata).
Otters are found alongside — and in — rivers, streams and shorelines in many parts of the world. These semi-aquatic small carnivores eat fish and a variety of shrimp, crabs and other invertebrates. Those who study otters know them to be intelligent, lively and highly social within their extended family groups.
When I was doing field research in the lowland and swamp forests in different parts of Malaysia in Southeast Asia, I took great pleasure in glimpsing the telltale signs of mud slides down the river banks — a sure sign that otters were in the area. Seeing a small family of small-clawed otters bounding alongside a small river would inevitably enliven my day.
Observing the world’s smallest otter in action was always a treat and, delightfully, not uncommon some 25 years ago.
But since then they — and their larger Asian cousins, smooth-coated otters — have become increasingly, alarmingly rare. Massive loss of lowland and coastal swamp forests to development, industrial agriculture and aquaculture — together with serious pollution of waterways — has greatly reduced their potential habitat and food supplies.
Smooth-coated otters at Dudhwa Tiger Reserve, India. Photo: Manan Singh Mahadev (CC BY 2.0)
Meanwhile international criminal networks traffic otter pelts with other valuable species, such as tiger and leopard. Unfortunately enforcement across the clandestine trade chain for otters tends to be much weaker than for their readily recognizable big cat fellow carnivores, despite the fact that the otter trade often occurs on a huge scale. One seizure by enforcement officials might result in the discovery of hundreds of pelts.
This week’s decision by CITES parties to list both small-clawed and smooth-coated otters on Appendix I means that all international commercial trade in both species is now illegal. It gives governments in countries where the otters naturally live, as well as those in countries where they are trafficked and sold, additional legal tools to stop this devastating trade.
Much work still needs to be done. These and other otter species require additional protections at the national level to prevent domestic trade and further habitat loss. Existing otter cafés should switch back to domestic species such as cats to reduce consumer demand for more captive otters, and authorities should ensure that this happens. Enforcement of the new international trade rules will be critical to the species’ survival.
That’s why this week’s action at CITES is important: It sends a message to the global community that these entirely wonderful animals are in trouble and need our help — and that does not mean cuddling them in our homes and cafés. It means leaving them, undisturbed, in their wild tropical habitats, with their own extended families — to dive for fish, play and thrive in their natural homes for decades to come.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
Returning prescribed fire to California forests is the focus of a new climate-adaptation plan from the Karuk Tribe, but the federal government will need to play big role.
More and more land in California is going up in flames. The area in the state burned by wildfires has increased by a factor of five since 1972, according to a recent study, which identified human-caused warming the likely culprit.
So what’s to be done?
The Karuk Tribe wants to fight fire with fire.
This summer the tribe, one of the largest in the state, released a climate-adaptation plan that calls for a return to a more natural fire regime. According to the plan, using prescribed burns at appropriate times of the year in place of the current policy of fire suppression would reduce the possibility of high-severity fires, which have proven deadly and costly for California in recent years and are expected to worsen as the climate warms.
“Climate adaptation is about restoring human responsibilities and appropriate relationships to the natural world,” says Bill Tripp, deputy director of Karuk Natural Resources Department and a co-author of the plan.
Wildfires have always been a part of the ecology of California, and “Karuk people have long been part of the ecosystem,” says Tripp. Prescribed burning, in particular, has been a key part of cultural practices of Indigenous people for millennia. As the Karuk climate plan explains, “Due in part to these thousands of years of purposeful fire management, the forests of this region are ecologically dependent on fires that are low in heat production, or ‘cooler’ fires.”
But much of that historic burning was snuffed out with the arrival of white settlers and a century-long U.S. government policy of fire suppression. In the Karuk territory and many other areas of the West, ecosystems are adapted to burn frequently, but suppression disrupts those natural processes. Instead, forests end up with dense, homogenous stands of trees, meadows are crowded out and dead materials accumulate on the forest floor — all of which can contribute to high-intensity fires that are now being supersized by warmer, drier forest conditions.
For the Karuk this has consequences for everything from food to culture. As the plan explains, “The exclusion of fire has led to radical ecological changes including high fuel loads, decreased habitat for large game such as elk and deer, reduction in the quantity and quality of acorns, and alteration of growth patterns of basketry materials such as hazel and willow.”
Logs from the Westside salvage logging sale after a fire near the Klamath River. (Photo by Jenny Staats)
Many scientists, as well as tribes, are calling for more controlled burns, but efforts for the Karuk to bring fire back to the land — and better increase their resilience in the face of climate change — are complicated by issues of sovereignty and lagging policy.
Contested Land
The Karuk people hail from the rugged and remote Klamath-Siskiyou Mountains in Northern California, along the Klamath and Salmon rivers. Most of their aboriginal territory of just over 1 million acres is currently managed by the federal government as national forest, although the tribe never ceded the land.
Instead the tribe’s “heavily timbered, mineral-rich homeland” was “taken by the United States without ratification of its treaties negotiated in 1851,” historian Stephen Dow Beckham wrote in an article two years ago. With the promise of a reservation never fulfilled, the tribe has virtually no land base.
Tribal members are still dependent on the resources from the nearby forests for food, fiber and cultural practices, but decisions about how that land is managed falls to outside agencies, like the U.S. Forest Service.
That leaves the tribe with little control over its own future. The tribe is concerned that poor land management, combined with climate change, increasingly puts them at risk and threatens their cultural resources.
The risks have already started to materialize: Temperatures in the region have increased 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1931, and the tribe has already seen more variable precipitation, decreased snowpack, earlier snowmelt, less spring runoff, drier fall weather, a longer fire season, and more insect pests and pathogens — including Phytophthora ramorum, which causes “sudden oak death.” All those things are expected to worsen with warming temperatures, and the ecological changes could affect other species of cultural significance for the tribe, including chinook salmon, Pacific lamprey, beavers, Pacific giant salamander, tanoaks, evergreen huckleberry and elk. Some species already face compounding environmental pressures from fire suppression, dams, logging and water diversions.
But the biggest concern is in the increased risk of high-severity fire, which can damage homes and infrastructure, create public-health risks, destroy cultural resources and diminish water quality. Big wildfires have already hit close to home for the Karuk. In 2008 the massive Klamath Theater Complex Fire, a conflagration that united 11 separate blazes, burned for three months in the region and consumed more than 190,000 acres. Then in 2014 the Happy Camp Complex Fire burned 134,000 acres, ripping through the heart of Karuk territory and prompting the tribe to turn its community center into a refuge for residents forced to evacuate their homes.
A view of the Happy Camp Complex Fire in the Klamath National Forest in California, which began on Sep. 17, 2014. (Photo by Joshua Veal, U.S. Forest Service)
The Karuk’s climate-adaptation plan is an effort to shift the management dynamic and builds on some recent cooperative work among the Forest Service, the Karuk and other local groups.
“This plan is years in the making and we’re hoping we’ll be able to actually start to change the paradigm in the way fire is managed in Karuk country,” says Tripp.
The Karuk’s plan is also part of a growing effort from dozens of tribes across the United States to assess climate vulnerability and build adaptation plans, although each tribe faces unique challenges, especially tribes without federal recognition. (The Karuk have federal recognition, a relative rarity in California.)
It’s a trend that’s deeply needed.
“Indigenous people are disproportionately impacted by the changing climate as they lack the financial resources to build new infrastructure,” says Kari Norgaard, associate professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the Karuk plan. “But for the Karuk, their vulnerability to climate change is also a function of state policy — the Karuk’s ability to do what they want to do is reduced because of those structural conditions.” Basic management decisions regarding land-use, logging and fire policy are out of their hands.
At the same time, says Norgaard, tribal members possess a wealth of information on the management of local ecosystems that should play a leading role as the region plans for how to cope with climate impacts.
“Native American tribes and native nations have been at the forefront of a lot of climate work, whether that’s in the-street-protests or putting up solar panels or doing climate adaptation plans,” she says.
But daunting challenges remain.
“One of the biggest obstacles is the sense that indigenous knowledge is sort of dead or not valid,” says Norgaard, who has conducted collaborative research projects with the Karuk since 2003. “Many people just do not understand how much indigenous knowledge about fire use is really a modern science still today.” Western scientists have increasingly called for the incorporation of traditional ecological knowledge into new plans for reintroducing natural fire regimes back to the landscape.
The Science of Burning
Indeed the Karuk’s call for more prescribed burning is supported by a growing body of scientific studies.
“Prescribed fire is one of the most widely advocated management practices for reducing wildfire hazard and has a long and rich tradition rooted in indigenous and local ecological knowledge,” Crystal A. Kolden, an associate professor in the Department of Forest, Rangeland and Fire Sciences at the University of Idaho, wrote in a report in the journal Fire. “The scientific literature has repeatedly reported that prescribed fire is often the most effective means of achieving such goals by reducing fuels and wildfire hazard and restoring ecological function to fire-adapted ecosystems in the United States following a century of fire exclusion.”
Smoke over the Klamath River during the Klamath River Prescribed Fire Training Exchange. (Photo by Jenny Staats)
Despite those scientific findings, the actual practice of prescribed burns lags greatly, as does funding. A recent report from Climate Central found that federal funding for prescribed burns is a fraction of what’s allocated for suppression.
And that’s become obvious on the ground. Kolden’s research revealed that prescribed burning hasn’t increased across the western United States in the past 20 years. In some places it has actually decreased. Most of the prescribed burning happening in the country, she found, was in the Southeast.
That worries Bill Tripp.
“When I hear the agencies talking about having a 97 percent success rate of suppressing fires, it makes me think that 97 percent of what should have been burning isn’t,” he says.
Kolden’s report suggests that we need a larger cultural shift and better public education about prescribed fires and their role in reducing wildlife risk. “Without such a shift, more catastrophic wildfire disasters are inevitable,” she wrote.
And that’s at the crux of the Karuk’s intention with their plan, a big part of which is working on increased engagement and public education, as well as more “interjurisdictional coordination” — allowing the Karuk to help drive management policy.
But even if all that goes well, there are still challenges to returning low-intensity fire to areas that haven’t been burned in 100 years.
“Just the cost alone is going to be quite expensive, and then there are issues of workforce development and training,” says Tripp. “It’s not just about burning a certain number of acres. It’s about how you put fire on the ground — it needs to be done right.”
There’s also the public perception or “social license,” he says. Twenty years ago, the majority of people believed that all fire was bad, says Tripp. But he’s seen that mentality shift in recent years. More and more people are learning that fire can be used beneficially — although it can be still be a tough sell in a state that has seen recent wildfires claim dozens of lives.
But the Karuk are hoping to convince people through example. The tribe has been working closely for years to develop a plan with the Six Rivers National Forest on a 5,500-acre demonstration project that will allow them to begin some restoration and prescribed burning in the national forest. They hope to carry the lessons learned from that work to further efforts, says Tripp.
Students from the Klamath River pick up acorns from a recently burned area near the town of Orleans, Calif. (Photo by Jenny Staats)
“I’m hoping that we could end up getting to a place to where we can just all work together to make this all happen and try to mitigate these effects of climate change the best we can and protect as many of the species as we can that may be in peril,” he adds.
Norgaard says she feels that efforts like this can help people see that the threats of climate change and wildfires don’t have to leave people feeling disempowered.
“There is a lot we can do,” she says, “and we need to be doing it now.”
USDA’s Wildlife Services often uses “cyanide bombs” to kill animals, but that’s just one of the inhumane weapons in their arsenal.
Wildlife advocates got a much-needed win recently when the EPA withdrew its support for M-44 “cyanide bombs” used to kill coyotes and other animals. The devices — which attract animals with tasty bait and then inject a deadly dose of sodium cyanide into their mouths — have been used for decades by a USDA program called Wildlife Services to eliminate animals that are perceived as threats to agricultural interests.
The announcement came just five days after the EPA re-approved the use of M-44s, a move that generated outcry from around the country.
Of course, M-44s are just one of the weapons in Wildlife Service’s arsenal. The program’s staff uses a variety of additional tools and methods to complete their tasks, including several that wildlife advocates consider to be cruel and inhumane.
These methods add up. All told Wildlife Services killed 2.6 million animals in 2018, including 1.1 million invasive species and 1.5 million native animals.
For more on these methods and some of the species affected, check out our video below:
New research finds that ocean warming has damaged some fisheries and benefited others, although the losers outweigh the winners. But there’s still some encouraging news.
Climate change has been steadily warming the ocean, which absorbs most of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, for 100 years. This warming is altering marine ecosystems and having a direct impact on fish populations. About half of the world’s population relies on fish as a vital source of protein, and the fishing industry employs more the 56 million people worldwide.
My recent study with colleagues from Rutgers University and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that ocean warming has already impacted global fish populations. We found that some populations benefited from warming, but more of them suffered.
Overall, ocean warming reduced catch potential — the greatest amount of fish that can be caught year after year — by a net 4 percent over the past 80 years. In some regions, the effects of warming have been much larger. The North Sea, which has large commercial fisheries, and the seas of East Asia, which support some of the fastest-growing human populations, experienced losses of 15 percent to 35 percent.
Although ocean warming has already challenged the ability of ocean fisheries to provide food and income, swift reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and reforms to fisheries management could lessen many of the negative impacts of continued warming.
How and Why Does Ocean Warming Affect Fish?
My collaborators and I like to say that fish are like Goldilocks: They don’t want their water too hot or too cold, but just right.
Put another way, most fish species have evolved narrow temperature tolerances. Supporting the cellular machinery necessary to tolerate wider temperatures demands a lot of energy. This evolutionary strategy saves energy when temperatures are “just right,” but it becomes a problem when fish find themselves in warming water. As their bodies begin to fail, they must divert energy from searching for food or avoiding predators to maintaining basic bodily functions and searching for cooler waters.
Thus, as the oceans warm, fish move to track their preferred temperatures. Most fish are moving poleward or into deeper waters. For some species, warming expands their ranges. In other cases it contracts their ranges by reducing the amount of ocean they can thermally tolerate. These shifts change where fish go, their abundance and their catch potential.
Warming can also modify the availability of key prey species. For example, if warming causes zooplankton — small invertebrates at the bottom of the ocean food web — to bloom early, they may not be available when juvenile fish need them most. Alternatively, warming can sometimes enhance the strength of zooplankton blooms, thereby increasing the productivity of juvenile fish.
Understanding how the complex impacts of warming on fish populations balance out is crucial for projecting how climate change could affect the ocean’s potential to provide food and income for people.
Warming is affecting virtually all regions of the ocean.
Impacts of Historical Warming on Marine Fisheries
Sustainable fisheries are like healthy bank accounts. If people live off the interest and don’t overly deplete the principal, both people and the bank thrive. If a fish population is overfished, the population’s “principal” shrinks too much to generate high long-term yields.
Similarly, stresses on fish populations from environmental change can reduce population growth rates, much as an interest rate reduction reduces the growth rate of savings in a bank account.
In our study we combined maps of historical ocean temperatures with estimates of historical fish abundance and exploitation. This allowed us to assess how warming has affected those interest rates and returns from the global fisheries bank account.
Losers Outweigh Winners
We found that warming has damaged some fisheries and benefited others. The losers outweighed the winners, resulting in a net 4 percent decline in sustainable catch potential over the last 80 years. This represents a cumulative loss of 1.4 million metric tons previously available for food and income.
The reddish and brown circles represent fish populations whose maximum sustainable yields have dropped as the ocean has warmed. The darkest tones represent extremes of 35 percent. Blueish colors represent fish yields that increased in warmer waters. (Chris Free, CC BY-ND)
Some regions have been hit especially hard. The North Sea, with large commercial fisheries for species like Atlantic cod, haddock and herring, has experienced a 35 percent loss in sustainable catch potential since 1930. The waters of East Asia, neighbored by some of the fastest-growing human populations in the world, saw losses of 8 percent to 35 percent across three seas.
Other species and regions benefited from warming. Black sea bass, a popular species among recreational anglers on the U.S. East Coast, expanded its range and catch potential as waters previously too cool for it warmed. In the Baltic Sea, juvenile herring and sprat — another small herring-like fish — have more food available to them in warm years than in cool years, and have also benefited from warming. However, these climate winners can tolerate only so much warming, and may see declines as temperatures continue to rise.
Management Boosts Fishes’ Resilience
Our work suggests three encouraging pieces of news for fish populations.
First, well-managed fisheries, such as Atlantic scallops on the U.S. East Coast, were among the most resilient to warming. Others with a history of overfishing, such as Atlantic cod in the Irish and North seas, were among the most vulnerable. These findings suggest that preventing overfishing and rebuilding overfished populations will enhance resilience and maximize long-term food and income potential.
Second, new research suggests that swift climate-adaptive management reforms can make it possible for fish to feed humans and generate income into the future. This will require scientific agencies to work with the fishing industry on new methods for assessing fish populations’ health, set catch limits that account for the effects of climate change and establish new international institutions to ensure that management remains strong as fish migrate poleward from one nation’s waters into another’s. These agencies would be similar to multinational organizations that manage tuna, swordfish and marlin today.
Finally, nations will have to aggressively curb greenhouse gas emissions. Even the best fishery management reforms will be unable to compensate for the 4 degree Celsius ocean temperature increase that scientists project will occur by the end of this century if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced.
The opinions expressed above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
A look at five years of published studies finds that most primate species and habitats remain understudied. There are ways to fix that.
There are more than 500 known primate species, but it would be hard to tell that by looking at recent research. Want to know how chimpanzees are doing across Africa? We can tell you plenty about them. But understanding how nocturnal pottos are doing across the same region? That may be more difficult.
Here’s why: A new study by primatologists Michelle Bezanson of Santa Clara University and Allison McNamara of University of Texas-Austin surveyed 29,000 recent journal articles and found a lack of diversity in the species studied, field sites chosen and research topics.
And that’s troubling. Now is a critical time for primate conservation: Approximately 60 percent of primate species are endangered, half of them critically. And yet, as McNamara and Bezanson’s research of peer-reviewed studies published between 2011 to 2015 found, less than 20 percent of research was focused on conservation. Instead the studies focused on topics such as behavior and ecology, which address theoretical questions. And many papers did not acknowledge the contributions of local communities. Without basic research on the most severely threatened primate species, we lack the information and infrastructure needed to save them. And successful conservation efforts can only happen with the cooperation and investment of the local human communities who live alongside them.
In addition, there was a strong bias toward a small set of species.
Species represented in field primatology publications 2011–2015. Top 10 species represented by species‐specific silhouettes labeled with number of field visits: Pan troglodytes, Macaca fuscata, Macaca mulatta, Alouatta palliata, Alouatta pigra, Gorilla gorilla, Cebus capucinus, Papio hamadryas, Ateles geoffroyi, Lemur catta. All other species are represented by dots, the size of which reflects the number of field visits. In all, 240 species were examined in 876 field visits.
Slightly less than half of the 504 known primate species were the subjects of published research. Only 18 percent of publications focused on primates that were critically endangered or lacking the necessary data for IUCN assessment. The most frequently studied primates were the common chimpanzee in Africa, followed by long-tailed macaques and rhesus macaques in Asia, mantled howler monkeys and black howler monkeys in Central America, and western gorillas in Africa. Of the 10 most commonly studied primates, only the western gorilla is critically endangered.
The authors also found that research was limited geographically. Most of the primatologists whose studies they looked at worked in forested areas, primarily in national parks. Mainland Africa had the highest number of site visits, followed by North/South America, Asia and Madagascar. In each of these regions, site visits were concentrated among a handful of long-term research locations. In Madagascar, for instance, nearly half of all published research came from just four field sites.
With research limited to well-known study sites and popular species, we risk losing the understudied species before we can begin to understand them. When conservation efforts start too late, we may end up looking for animals that are no longer even there. For example, efforts started in the 1990s to search for Miss Waldron’s red colobus (Piliocolobus waldroni) after almost two decades without seeing a living individual. Though there has been evidence of what may the last few dead animals from photos and pelts, they are now presumed to be extinct.
These data present an alarming perspective on where primatologists are focusing their research efforts — but there’s reason for hope, as well.
The researchers focused on higher-impact publications, and that may have skewed the results to paint a grimmer picture. The journals assessed in this study have high standards for publication. As the field of primatology has been saturated with new researchers, increased publication pressure and diminishing funding opportunities, the stakes have gotten higher. While peer review plays an important role in ensuring publications meet scientific standards, they are also biased toward prioritizing novel theoretical research, at the expense of population surveys and basic ecological data.
Additionally, as the bar for publication is often set by the best-funded projects at long-term field sites, it’s increasingly difficult to publish research based on limited sample sizes, shorter field seasons, or without the breadth of long-term data. But that kind of research is needed, because some small studies provide key information on basic natural history and set up the baseline data and infrastructure for future research.
And some of that research may be out there — just not in the places that McNamara and Bezanson surveyed. I suspect that if we looked at regional journals focusing on African, Asian, or Central and South American primates, we’d see a greater representation of species breadth, as well as conservation-focused articles. Some primatologists may also be preferentially submitting their conservation work to journals with that focus, where the research may be more likely to inform on-the-ground efforts.
Still, McNamara and Bezanson’s survey reveals a need for changes in the field of primate research to better serve conservation goals.
A mantled howler monkey at El Zota Biological Field Station in Costa Rica. (Photo by Michelle A. Rodrigues
A good place to start is examining the kind of research opportunities that get funded in the first place. The competition for publication can act as selection pressure, encouraging funding agencies to devote resources to long-term sites and established researchers, and discouraging students and early-career researchers from branching out to new sites and new species. These pressures are intensified by the competitive nature of both academic and non-academic job markets in which publications may make the difference between staying in primatology or leaving the field altogether.
The stakes are even higher if you conduct research at a newer field site, or on a species that is difficult to study. Researching understudied primates requires surmounting a number of hurdles, including finding funding, obtaining research permits, and overcoming the logistical challenges of establishing the field site and accessing the primates themselves. Most studies of primate behavior and biology require habituation, where researchers must attempt to follow the primates until they adjust to the researchers’ presence. This process can take anywhere few weeks to decades and is not always successful. But without habituation, it’s very hard to collect direct data on the animals.
Funding agencies that focus on primate fieldwork need to prioritize applied conservation research rather than solely theoretical work. Funders can ensure that primate fieldwork addresses conservation impact by instituting requirements that studies tackle the broad implications of their findings, such as conservation initiatives including local educational outreach and policy outcomes.
Editors and reviewers at top primatology journals should consider the way their review processes may hinder publication of conservation-focused research. Rather than holding all manuscripts under review to the data standards of established long-term field sites and well-studied species, these journals could encourage editors and reviewers to consider publication of smaller sample sizes, shorter field seasons or smaller datasets if the manuscripts present data from newer field sites and understudied primate populations.
Finally, primatologists should consider how to best generate public interest in primate conservation and galvanize that interest toward conservation funding. One of the most frustrating challenges for primatologists is that much of the enthusiasm for our study subjects ends up causing the primates harm. Interest in cute viral videos and selfie tourism often fuels the illegal pet and entertainment trades, while misleading the public to believe the primates are not endangered. We need to combat these problems and find new ways to channel public interest in charismatic primates into successful conservation outcomes.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
Journalist Ian Urbina’s daring new book The Outlaw Ocean uncovers a dark world of exploitation on the high seas — a world that exists out of the public eye and beyond the rule of law.
Our oceans are a vast, lawless frontier. But this long-exploited, still mysterious realm is central to modern economic life.
About 90 percent of international trade occurs by ship. Oceans provide fossil fuels and then absorb most of the carbon dioxide and heat produced by burning them. Billions of people in the poorest countries rely on the ocean for food and work.
And some of the most brutal forms of economic exploitation take place on the water. Sea slavery and other flagrant human-rights violations are rampant. And industrial-scale overfishing, both legal and illegal, has undermined conservation efforts and pushed prized fish species toward extinction.
This all happens out of view: The average American has little idea what went into putting fish on his or her plate, or where all that plastic packaging will end up. Even governments that try to police the worst abuses are often in the dark.
Thankfully new light is being shined on the problem.
New York Times reporter Ian Urbina has gone to great, dangerous lengths to peel back that veil. First in his “The Outlaw Ocean” series, and now in his new book, The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontiers, Urbina reveals the horrifying conditions and idealistic possibilities of life at sea.
The scope of Urbina’s reporting has been astounding. He’s recounted a harrowing voyage on a massive Thai purse seiner worked by forced Cambodian labor and a months-long pursuit of an illegal fishing boat through iceberg-strewn waters. He’s interviewed whistleblowers about sea slavery and illegal dumping by cruise ships. He’s told of a submarine trip to a Brazilian coral reef that oil companies sought to secretly hurt and travels with a colorful maritime repo man. He’s made visits to a ship that offers abortions near places where they’re illegal and ocean outposts that claim a quirky kind of national sovereignty or illegally trade arms, oil or people.
“For all that adventure, though, the most important thing I saw from ships all around the world, and have tried in this book to capture, was an ocean woefully under-protected and the mayhem and misery often faced by those who work these waters,” writes Urbina in his introduction.
Even when enterprising journalists, activists or regulatory agencies discover and expose some to the worst abuses of our oceans — such as fishing-boat workers getting kidnapped or tricked into brutal, years-long servitude or desperate stowaways summarily executed — there are few effective international mechanisms to right the wrongs.
“Such is the inconvenient truth of globalization: it is based more on market sleight of hand than on Adam Smith’s invisible hand,” Urbina writes. “By outsourcing this task [of staffing fishing boats] to manning agencies, the people who work in the corporate responsibility and human resource offices of the grocery store chains and fish wholesalers further down the supply chain need not try to understand or explain how it is possible that the captains on these boats found workers willing to work for so little.”
Capitalism and its big players treat oceans as an inexhaustible domain for extracting resources and dumping waste, while avoiding national human-rights and environmental-protection laws and standards.
And yet, as Urbina writes, “the ocean was not meant to be a thing we use or a place where we extract resources and dump waste. It was vast habitat that we should leave alone or, better still, protect and help to flourish. Less meant to fill our wallets or stomachs, the ocean was an opportunity to expand our humanity, foster biodiversity, and prove our ability to live in balance with the rest of the planet’s occupants.”
To that end the book concludes with recommendations for ways we can better protect mariners, create a more transparent food-supply system, protect ocean environments from illegal dumping and plundering, and devise a system for monitoring and investigating offshore crimes.
But first we need to open our eyes to the important role of oceans in modern life and summon the political will to be their wise stewards.
“The ocean is outlaw not because it is inherently good or bad but because it is a void, like silence is to sound or boredom is to activity,” he writes. “While we have for centuries embraced and touted the life that springs from these waters, we have tended to ignore its role as a refuge of depravity. But the outlaw ocean is real, as it has been for centuries, and until we reckon with that fact, we can forget about ever taming or protecting this frontier.”
In her new book, author and ethicist Harriet Washington unearths one of the most overlooked aspects of environmental racism.
Flint, Michigan, may now be synonymous with environmental health disasters, but Flint is no anomaly, says science writer and ethicist Harriet Washington. We are a nation of Flints. From small towns like Anniston, Alabama, to big cities like Washington, D.C., environmental health dangers are widespread and communities of color are the people most likely to be assaulted by heavy metals, pesticides and other poisons.
Environmental racism has been well documented for decades — beginning with the work of sociologist Robert Bullard in Houston in the 1970s to a recent study in March on pollution burdens.
But as Washington writes in her new book A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind, the fallout from environmental toxicity isn’t just physical. Lead, arsenic, mercury, PCBs, phthalates, DDT and even some pathogens can all rob people of their mental acuity and lower their intelligence, disrupting their livelihoods and thwarting their potential.
Washington, a former research fellow in medical ethics at Harvard Medical School and senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University, is also the author of Infectious Madness andMedical Apartheid, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award.
We spoke to Washington about why the dangers to mental capacity from environmental pollution are so often overlooked, why communities of color bear the brunt and what can be done about it.
How did the idea for this book come about?
I’ve always been fascinated by poisons of all kinds — everything from heavy metals to pathogens. In the early ‘80s I managed a poison-control center that was part of an upstate teaching hospital in New York. But after a while I began to see there were social patterns and so I studied public health.
I did a piece for the American Scholar called “The Well Curve” about how neglected tropical diseases were lowering the cognition of people in the developing world. And as I wrote that article, I also noted that these tropical diseases that we think of as being foreign diseases, they’re actually domestic diseases now — we have them right here in our country. And I realized that pathogens, along with the traditional heavy metals and industrial chemicals people worry about — all these things are concentrated in enclaves of people of color.
Author and medical ethicist Harriet Washington. (Photo courtesy of publisher)
And they are in fact hobbling people cognitively and behaviorally, as well as physically. They’re stealing cognition as well as health, and this is an emergent situation.
Most of the research on environmental health issues focuses on things like cancer clusters and other kinds of impairments to physical health. Why did you decide to focus on how environmental toxins threaten intelligence and mental capacity?
I think that the lowering of intelligence is a lot harder to perceive sometimes. If you’re poisoned as an infant or maybe in the womb or as a child, behavioral problems or lowered cognition may not be recognized until decades later. We’re not always aware of the fact that these industrial chemicals and heavy metals are eroding our intelligence. It’s not as easy to see as cancer.
David Ralll, a scientist [and former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences] once said that if thalidomide [which was widely used to treat morning sickness] had lowered IQ instead of causing very visible birth defects, it would still be on the market.
I also wanted to point out how important it is to understand the exquisite vulnerability of fetuses and the young to environmental poisons. One of the arguments by industry scientists is that we’re often talking about tiny little exposures that can’t be dangerous. But we know now that tiny exposures can be devastating to a fetal brain. I think that dismissing an exposure because it’s small is very foolish.
You write in the book that poverty is often talked about as the biggest risk factor for why some communities face greater threats from environmental toxins, but actually race is a better indicator. Why is that mistake so often made and what’s the danger of it?
The fact is that being poor is a risk factor, but your race is a much stronger risk factor. If you look at data on income and toxicity, African Americans with a mean income of $50,000 to $60,000 — solidly middle class — have a much higher rate of exposure than white Americans who make $10,000 a year.
So clearly poverty is not the most important risk factor in this — race is. And I think that it’s so often described misleadingly as socio-economics because people are more comfortable with that. If you admit that it’s race rather than socioeconomics that dictates these exposures, well what are you saying? You’re admitting to racism, which is a shameful thing to admit.
Socioeconomics actually sounds better. But unfortunately, it’s also a subtle form of blaming the victim. We still have this Calvinistic hangover where it’s believed that poor people are poor because of some fault or some flaw of their own. So it’s a lot more comfortable to say they’re poor and that’s why they are at risk of toxic exposure than because they’re black or Hispanic.
What do you think we lose as a society by these assaults on intelligence from industrial chemicals and other environmental toxins?
I think it might be almost impossible to tease out exactly how much we’re losing.
One of the things that we’re insufficiently attentive to is that people in these ethnic enclaves — people on the reservations, Hispanics and African Americans living in these fence-line communities or in urban settings — they’re suffering the most, but the whole country is suffering.
Bruce Lanphear [a physician and a professor in Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University] looked at what a drop in just 5 IQ points across the U.S. population would mean. And he found it would cut the number of gifted children in half and dramatically increase the number of mentally handicapped people.
We’re losing a great of deal of intelligence to lead, mercury, arsenic and industrial chemicals. Even pesticides that have been banned for 40 years, like DDT, are still showing up in children’s food. We’re basically operating in a sea — like a witch’s brew — of industrial chemicals that are poisonous and are weakening our cognition.
It’s really pervasive and we’ve quantified it enough to know that it’s a crisis.
Is the environmental community doing enough to combat environmental racism?
With the environmental community there’s always more that can be done. But I think it’s really important to acknowledge the fact that we’re making strides and going in the right direction — as long as you exclude the EPA, which is doing much worse.
For a long time I thought of environmental groups as having good missions but very divergent from those of African American and Hispanic people because they were focused on things like preserving the wild and on recreational environmental issues — things that seem very tangential to saving the lives of people who are directly threatened by toxins.
But that has changed. I see their missions evolving and now they are also tackling some of these issues. I think it’s pretty common belief that the issues facing people of color, who are the worst victims of exposure to environmental toxins in this country, are separate from those of whites, but that’s not really true. As cognition in ethnic enclaves is affected, as their behaviors are affected by these poisons, it’s going to affect the entire country. So it’s a problem for all of us.
New wildlife trade rules being discussed at CITES could affect 550 species, including elephants, rhinos and giraffes.
Dozens of important and potentially controversial decisions for the world’s most imperiled wildlife will come out of Geneva over the next few weeks.
That’s where the representatives from 183 nations will gather to discuss issues related to legal and illegal wildlife trade at the 18th triennial meeting of the member parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a treaty aimed at regulating the commercial sale of threatened plants and wildlife.
CITES protects species by adding them to what’s known as its Appendices — listings of species that may or may not be traded. Species listed on Appendix I are banned from all international trade, while those on Appendix II may only be traded from proven sustainable populations. About 90 percent of CITES listings appear on Appendix II.
This year’s 12-day CITES meeting (Aug. 17-28), known as the Conference of the Parties, was originally scheduled for earlier this year in Sri Lanka but delayed due to violence in that country. The postponement didn’t diminish the meeting’s scope, though. The agenda includes a record 57 proposals affecting more than 550 highly traded species, ranging from megafauna such as elephants, rhinos and giraffes to less charismatic but lucratively traded species like sea cucumbers and rosewood trees.
“CITES sets the rules for international trade in wild fauna and flora,” CITES Secretary General Ivonne Higuero said in a press release earlier this month. “It is a powerful tool for ensuring sustainability and responding to the rapid loss of biodiversity — often called the sixth extinction crisis — by preventing and reversing declines in wildlife populations. This year’s conference will focus on strengthening existing rules and standards while extending the benefits of the CITES regime to additional plants and animals threatened by human activity.”
Let’s take a look at five of the biggest issues on the table this year:
1. Rhinos and Elephants
Despite rampant, ongoing poaching threats, proposals this year could actually open up legal trade in elephants or rhinos.
Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe have proposed allowing legal trade in elephant ivory from their countries, as well as from South Africa, something that’s currently banned. Zimbabwe, meanwhile, wants to be allowed to sell live elephants to China.
These countries’ elephants are all currently listed under CITES Appendix II, while other nations’ elephants are listed in Appendix I. The four nations argue their elephant populations are healthy and can withstand international trade, but most experts argue that any legal ivory sale helps to spur demand for the products, which then inspires additional poaching and illegal trafficking. Experts also point out that African elephants frequently cross national borders, so they shouldn’t be considered the “national property” of any given country.
Meanwhile, a competing proposal would move elephants from these four nations to Appendix I, which would end the current “split listing,” restrict international trade and put all African elephants on the same level playing field.
We’ll have to wait and see which, if either, of these proposals gains traction. CITES itself recently published a report that found “poaching continues to threaten the long-term survival of the African elephant,” so the prospects of opening up trade again seem less than likely, but proponents of commercialization remain steadfast.
Rhino by Henri Bergius (CC BY-SA 2.0)
As for rhinos, eSwatini (formerly known as Swaziland) and Namibia want to open up trade for their southern white rhino populations, with the former wanting to sell rhino horns and the latter asking to sell both hunting trophies and live rhinos. South Africa also wants to increase trophy hunting of its black rhinos. Similar proposals were defeated at the last meeting three years ago, but commercial interests continue to push for legalization of the horn trade, something that’s likely to persist in the years ahead even if the proposals are again shot down this month.
2. Giraffes
The world’s tallest animals have undergone a shocking 40 percent population decline over the past few decades, and CITES will take up the issue for the first time this year. Thirty African states have submitted a proposal for restricting trade in giraffe hunting trophies, bones and hides under Appendix II.
Giraffe by David Davies (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The trophy hunting alone is a huge deal; according to the proposal, “the United States imported more than one giraffe hunting trophy a day” from 2006 to 2015. That’s more than 3,500 giraffes killed by American hunters over a single decade — the same period during which giraffe populations fell to fewer than 100,000.
Meanwhile we know the trade in most other giraffe products — such as the growing trade in giraffe-bone gun and knife handles — is extensive, but there are also huge data gaps concerning their country of origin or whether the specimens were legally or sustainably acquired. This reveals a need to place serious controls on this trade.
The disappearance of giraffes has often been referred to as a “silent extinction,” but the threats facing these iconic mammals have finally started to generate some noise. The fate of Africa’s giraffes may hinge on whether that’s now loud enough to generate support from a majority of voting parties this month.
CITES can’t address the vaquita directly — there’s no trade in the animals — but in 2016 the parties to the treaty agreed to take on illegal trafficking of a fish from the same area called totoaba. Illegal gillnet fishing for totoaba — their swim bladders sell for big bucks in China — has been responsible for the deaths of dozens of vaquita over the past few years.
That agreement, sadly, didn’t lead to much, if any, action. Now, as Mexico prepares to allow commercial breeding of totoaba, conservation organizations (including the Center for Biological Diversity, publisher of The Revelator) have called for trade sanctions against Mexico to ensure more vaquita protective measures are put in place. They’re also calling for additional funding and other support to conserve both vaquita and totoaba in the wild and stronger law enforcement to address the illegal totoaba trade.
This may also serve as a reminder for Mexico and other countries to follow through on their promises to protect other imperiled species.
No matter what happens in Geneva this will be a critical year for the vaquita — and, we hope, not one that will end with the species’ extinction.
4. Exotic Pets
Hundreds of species commonly found in the legal and illegal pet trade will be up for discussion this year, including a wide range of lizards, iguanas, turtles, tortoises, frogs, newts and even spiders. Most would be added to Appendix II, but several proposals would place species — such as the highly trafficked Indian star tortoise — on Appendix I to end all legal international trade.
Indian start tortoise by Damith Osuranga Danthanarayana (CC BY 2.0)
Perhaps the most interesting species on the pet-trade list is the spider-tailed horned viper from Iran, a huge, venomous snake known for using its tail to attract and kill birds. Trade in this species isn’t exactly rampant yet, but it’s turned up for sale recently on German social-networking sites. This measure would proactively try to control that trade before it gets any worse.
Of course, not all of these species are exclusively threatened by the pet trade. The tokay gecko, for example, is also highly traded for use in traditional medicine. That leads us to our next big topic.
5. Wildlife Trafficking
CITES will have an active agenda related to illegal wildlife trafficking this year, with key discussions on songbirds, big cats (especially China’s large number of tiger farms), coral, hawksbill turtles, saiga antelopes, rosewood and other species. Even woolly mammoths are on the list. (Yes, sometimes extinct species require protective trade restrictions. In this case ivory from recently killed elephants is sometimes disguised or laundered as mammoth ivory, a trade that could be curtailed by a proposal to add mammoths to Appendix II.)
Illegal wildlife property. Photo: Ryan Moehring/USFWS
In addition to species-specific proposals, the participants at this year’s CITES meeting will also discuss building international capacity to track and address the multibillion-dollar wildlife crime industry — a problem so pervasive that some experts say it may require an entirely separate convention. They’re also expected to discuss Vietnam’s role as both a consumer country and a hub for transit of wildlife parts, improving the livelihoods of rural communities, tactics to address wildlife cybercrime, and what to do with confiscated products from species such as pangolins, rhinos and rosewoods.
Big-nosed giant guitarfishes and wedgefishes are now the most endangered marine fish group. Will the international community step up to protect them from trade and exploitation?
Many scientists wait for their whole careers to see their predictions proven correct — and if that happens, it’s often cause for celebration. But for conservation scientists who study threatened species, it can be a gut punch to learn your prediction’s come true.
For Alec Moore, a conservation biologist at Bangor University, that’s exactly what happened.
In 2016 Moore participated in a symposium focusing on sawfishes, which were then considered the most endangered marine fish in the world. His talk, however, focused on emerging threats to a similar group of fishes called guitarfishes, a type of ray related to sharks.
At the time Moore said several of the 55 known guitarfish species faced a risk of extinction. He then called for “comprehensive and coordinated action” for guitarfish that could be conducted in conjunction with current sawfish conservation efforts — which themselves arrived almost too late.
“While great conservation work is now being done on sawfishes, we have to acknowledge that it had to get to an absolutely critical point before widespread efforts took place to protect them from total extinction,” Moore tells The Revelator. “I wanted to highlight that we would soon be in a similar situation with guitarfishes if we didn’t act now, while there were still some left.”
Last month the IUCN Red List announced that things had indeed taken a turn for the worse, as Moore had feared: Six species of giant guitarfishes and ten species of wedgefishes have now overtaken sawfish as the world’s most endangered marine fishes. Of the 16 species, 15 have been assessed as “critically endangered.”
“The wedgefishes and giant guitarfishes face an extremely high risk,” says Peter Kyne, a senior research fellow at Charles Darwin University. “Their critically endangered assessment means that these species are one step away from extinction.”
In response marine conservation biologists studying the species have dubbed the group “rhino rays” — an allusion to the terrestrial poster child of conservation. The new name also echoes back to the rhino rays’ taxonomic order — Rhinopristiformes — which itself stems from the fact that the rays have big, interesting noses.
Decisions pending this month could determine the fate of these increasingly rare fish.
What Are Rhino Rays, And What Threats Do They Face?
These shark-like rays live on the seafloor, in shallow tropical water close to shore. Some of them swim throughout the Indo-Pacific, while others have much more limited ranges.
“The false shark ray is only known from a single location, the Banc d’Arguin National Park in Mauritania,” says Kyne. ”The clown wedgefish has only been collected from fish markets in Singapore and Java, Indonesia, so its actual range and habitat are unknown.” He notes that many details of the biology of these animals are currently unknown to science.
What we do know is that they’re almost all at risk.
“A combination of factors explains their high extinction risk,” Kyne explains. This includes their slow reproductive rate, the life in shallow waters — which overlaps with “some of the most intense and increasing coastal fisheries in the world” — and their exploitation in fisheries both as target species and bycatch.
Bottlenose wedgefish (Rhynchobatus australiae) after processing at Kota Kinabalu fish market, Sabah, Malaysia. Photo: Peter Kyne, courtesy IUCN Shark Specialist Group
Living close to shore makes it easy for these species to be over-exploited. Giant guitarfish fins are some of the most valuable in the lucrative international shark fin trade, but they also face less well-publicized threats, including an increasingly popular dish called “dragon fish” made from boiling their heads until they become soft enough to eat.
#DYK? The gelatinous filling in Giant Guitarfish heads is a delicacy in parts of Asia, particularly Singapore. Learn how demand for #RhinoRay parts has contributed to them becoming the world’s most threatened marine fish (and what can be done about it): https://t.co/qNrxdNyjtRpic.twitter.com/qxEsYL3w1Y
CITES Happens Soon, But Is It Too Late to Help Rhino Rays?
With these threats now becoming better understood, the governments of the world may now decide what to do about them.
Later this month the 18th Conference of the Parties of CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) will take place in Geneva, Switzerland. This international meeting focuses on, you guessed it, regulating international trade in endangered species. Protections dozens of species are on the agenda, including elephants, mako sharks and rhino rays.
CITES has multiple levels of protection, called Appendices. Placing a species on a CITES appendix, called “listing,” triggers or inspires conservation action. The rhino rays are proposed for listing under CITES Appendix II, which, if passed, would only allow international trade in related products when an exporting government could demonstrate that it’s conducted sustainably.
“CITES Appendix I listings, which make commercial trade illegal and often result in full protections in countries globally, have been fairly rare,” says Luke Warwick, the associate director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s shark and ray program. Most CITES-protected sharks and rays, indeed 90 percent of listed species, appear under CITES Appendix II. While it doesn’t offer full protection, “it pushes countries toward sustainable fisheries management measures — the big gap for sharks and rays outside hyper-developed countries.”
A CITES listing would just be a start to protect these species, “but it is a really important step to complement these new IUCN assessments,” Warwick says. “It’s a great motivator for governments to act. By including a policy driver with that new science, these first steps can be used to facilitate change at the legislative level and on the water in priority countries globally before these animals disappear forever.”
Necessary, But Not Sufficient?
CITES can be a powerful tool for the conservation of threatened species, but it has limits.
“CITES relates only to international trade, and wedgefishes and giant guitarfishes are also caught, traded and utilized domestically,” Kyne says. “To conserve these species and permit their recovery, a range of measures will be required.” He says a major priority would be nation-level species protections and catch prohibitions. “Marine protected areas may also have a role to play, however we know little about the connectivity of populations and their movement patterns.”
Giant shovelnose rays (Glaucostegus typus) at Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef. Photo: Colin Simpfendorfer, courtesy IUCN Shark Specialist Group
As with any endangered species, he adds, “conservation and management will be dependent on effective enforcement, which can be challenging in developing tropical nations who may lack capacity and resources, and where management needs to be balanced with food security and local livelihoods.”
Experts say the new Red List assessment of the rhino rays is an urgent call for action: If we’re to avoid the extinction of a fascinating group of fishes, we must act now to protect them. And while a CITES Appendix II listing won’t entirely solve the problem, it’s an important step. For now we have to hope that the government representatives attending CITES will do the right thing and protect these rhinos of the sea — before some or all of them disappear forever.
Indonesia raised its captive and export quotas for this over-exploited species, just as new international regulations are about to be discussed.
A popular reptile often found in pet stores is also one of the most heavily traded wildlife species on the planet — perhaps even more than pangolins. A decision pending later this month could help change that.
Tokay geckos (Gekko gecko) are colorful, foot-long reptiles native to Southern China through southern and Southeast Asia. Although widespread they’re increasingly threatened throughout their range, with millions of animals traded every year for use in traditional Chinese medicines, and to a lesser extent, as pets, which are mainly exported to the European Union and United States.
Gecko tonic sold in China. Photo: Vberger/Wikipedia (public domain)
The species has been used in traditional medicine for hundreds of years and is sold throughout East and Southeast Asia in dried form or preserved in alcohol. Prior to export tokay geckos are typically slaughtered, gutted and stretched on bamboo frames and either dried in large kilns or sun-dried. After that they’re sold in male-female pairs to be boiled to create a tonic or wine, or ground into a powder and sold in pill form. It’s claimed that these products can treat skin problems, asthma, diabetes, cancer, erectile dysfunction, coughs and even HIV/AIDS. While there is some evidence for the medicinal value of tokay gecko derivatives (research has shown some anti-tumor properties), the majority of these claims are not clinically proven.
Indonesia: A Hub of Trade
The vast majority of the tokay geckos in trade are wild-caught, though large numbers are also labelled as purportedly bred in captivity.
Indonesia is the largest known exporter of tokay geckos, although the international trade from Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries is thought to number in the millions each year as well. Unfortunately little information on exports from other range countries is available. Although Indonesia did not, until this year, allow the export of dried specimens, research found that high levels of trade are still taking place, with an estimated 1.2 million dried geckos exported to China in 2006 alone. In 2011 authorities in Hong Kong seized 7.45 tons of dried tokay geckos en route to China from Indonesia.
Tokay geckos are not on Indonesia’s list of protected species, and trade in wild-caught specimens is subject to an annual harvest and export quota system. These quotas are known to be abused and ignored by traders, and are most often not based on science in the first place.
These quotas over the years have remained relatively stable, varying from 23,850-45,000 geckos annually from 2010 to 2018. However, this year the Indonesian Government inexplicitly raised the quota to a staggering 1.8 million animals, of which 21,250 are allotted for the pet trade and, for the first time, 1,778,750 are for the consumption trade.
Captive vs. Wild
So where do all of these millions of geckos come from?
Some dealers claim Indonesian geckos are captive-bred. Indeed, commercial captive breeding of wildlife is sometimes viewed as a means to remove or reduce the pressures of overexploitation on wild populations. But that’s probably not what’s happening here. Research has shown that such schemes are also frequently used as a mechanism to launder wild-caught specimens.
Len Worthington (CC BY-SA 2.0)
For example, in 2014 the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry allowed six companies to export a total of more than 3 million live, supposedly captive-bred tokay geckos for the pet trade. Regardless of the fact that there is hardly an international demand for this many tokay geckos in the pet industry, the logistics involved in breeding millions of geckos for the export market make such a claim questionable, to say the least.
In order to produce just a million adult-sized geckos, a facility would require 140,000 breeding females, 14,000 breeding males, 30,000 incubation containers in continuous use year-round and some 112,000 rearing cages — with a 100 percent hatchling survival rate. Fundamental care of these geckos would require hundreds of employees and a constant supply of food, all of which add significantly to the overall costs.
In reality, the exporting companies involved were found never to have bred this species in commercial numbers and were known to supply the trade with wild-caught reptiles for the medicinal and meat trade, not for pets — regardless of the fact that the quotas stipulated export was of live specimens for the pet trade only.
Indonesia is not alone. Protection for tokay geckos in the range states varies by country and international trade is currently uncontrolled — there are currently no mechanisms in place to assist countries in monitoring or regulating international trade or to collect accurate statistics on the international trade volumes. As such, the international trade is largely a free-for-all.
And all of this activity comes with a cost for the species. Studies have shown that such high trade levels are threatening wild populations, in particular in Indonesia and Thailand. Population declines have also been reported in Bangladesh, mainland China, Myanmar, the Philippines and Viet Nam. In Bangladesh, populations have reportedly declined by as much as 50 percent.
What Comes Next?
In view of the large-scale illegal and unsustainable trade — and taking into consideration the enormous numbers of wild-caught specimens laundered through bogus captive-breeding operations — India, the Philippines and the European Union have submitted a proposal to include the tokay gecko in Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). The proposal, which would place strict controls on trade, is due to be voted upon during the 18th Conference of Parties, held this month in Switzerland.
Considerable evidence has been that levels of trade in tokay geckos are extremely high and largely illegal and/or unsustainable and that wild populations are reportedly in decline from a number of range countries.
Obviously those benefiting from the current illegal and unsustainable trade will oppose this proposal. However it needs to be clear that listing this species in CITES Appendix II would not prevent trade. Instead it would provide a mechanism through which range countries could, with the cooperation of all CITES Parties, control, regulate and monitor the trade through a permit system, providing an opportunity to obstruct illegal trade.
Such oversight and control of the trade would be of great benefit to range countries wishing to protect or sustainably trade their tokay gecko populations and assist in achieving population recovery in those range countries where this species has begun to decline.
The opinions expressed above are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
Captive vs. Wild