Endangering Species: Listing Can Make Animals Valuable

Black Market Commodities

By Wendy Lyons Sunshine on September 8, 2009

Credit: NEW YORK STATE DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION

Through most of the last century, Javan hawk eagles (Spizaetus bartelsi) flew unnoticed through the
dwindling forests of Indonesia's principal island of Java. Their prominent head crest and multi-toned
plumage didn't attract attention, bird markets didn't sell them, nor did zoos have them on display. Then in
1993 the Indonesian government awarded Javan hawk eagles special protected status. That's when the
bird's fortune turnedfor the worse.
To celebrate the raptor's official "National Rare/Precious Animal" designation, the Indonesian government
printed the Javan hawk eagle's likeness on postage stamps and phone books. Soon zookeepers and illegal
pet collectors were clamoring for one of their own, and the birds began popping up for sale in markets
around Indonesia. In a study published earlier this year in Oryx, researchers from the University of
Amsterdam's zoological museum concluded that ever since the Indonesian government officially
labeled Javan hawk eagles as rare and precious, illegal poaching has removed the birds from the wild at
an ever-escalating pace. Over the period from 1975 to 1991, just three were sighted for sale in Indonesian
markets; in recent years 30 to 40 of the eagles have been spotted in markets annually.
The official listing of an animal as endangered can promote poaching, says Max Abensperg-Traun of the
Austrian Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Environment and Water Management, author of a study on
this topic that was published in the May 2009 issue of Biological Conservation. It is a matter of
psychology and economics. Perceived rareness makes animals more appealing to collectors and the
increasingly limited supply pushes their price up on the black market, making illegal trapping and hunting
more lucrative. Wildlife that once existed under the radar suffers from sudden visibility and faddish
appeal. In an ironic coup de grce, endangered species designation can sometimes escalate poaching to
the point that it wipes out the species it was intended to protect.
The lure of rarity
Enthusiasts covet rare animals as exotic pets and hunting trophies as well as for insect or birds' egg
collections. Through mathematical modeling, French conservation biologists showed in 2006 in PLoS
Biology how people's relentless drive to collect rare animals can push species to extinction. In the early

1900s, for example, island development shrank the Indonesian forest habitat of Bali tigers (Panthera tigris
ssp. Balica). Then European trophy hunters pursued the scarce remaining tigers, and by the 1940s had
driven them to extinction. Even scientists fall prey to the compulsion. Ornithologists and museum
administrators, for example, helped push the great auk (Pinguinus impennis) penguin out of existence in
1844 by fueling demand that pushed prices ever higher for its skin and eggs.
People are attracted by rare animals and will go to great lengths to see them, according to research by
ecologists Elena Angulo and Franck Courchamp, published in April 2009 in PLoS ONE. In the study,
when Web visitors were offered the opportunity to view photos of either endangered Nepalese gharials or
common voles online, they chose rare species most often. Visitors went to more trouble to load the rare
images and waited longer to see them online than did visitors who selected the common animals.
Consumers are hungry for rare animal delicacies, too. White abalone (Haliotis sorenseni), the first
federally protected marine invertebrate, now teeters at just 1 percent of its former population because so
many people find it tasty. In 2008 a federal recovery plan stated that the white abalone "was driven to
such low levels during the height of the commercial fishery that adults do not occur in high enough
densities to successfully reproduce, contributing to repeated recruitment failure and an effective
population size near zero." Without urgent and drastic human intervention, "the approximately 1,600
remaining white abalone in the wild would disappear by 2010."
"Herp" crazed
Reptile and amphibian fanciers, nicknamed "herpers" after the academic field herpetology, are especially
avid collectors of animals on the edge. A published report identifying the Roti Island snake-necked turtle
(Chelodina mccordi) in remote Indonesian wetlands was enough to spur a flurry of illegal trade that drove
the newly discovered reptile to the brink of extinction. Thought to already be extinct, the Philippine
forest turtle (Siebenrockiella leytensis) was rediscovered alive in 2001 and immediately targeted
by poachers and pet traders who sold them on the black market for as much as $2,500 apiece to buyers in
the U.S., Japan and Europe.
At a weekend market in Bangkok, Thailand, undercover researchers from TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade
monitoring network, saw boxes and tanks containing scarce freshwater turtles such as the radiated tortoise
(Astrochelys radiata), which appears on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red
List of Threatened Species. Hoping to persuade potential customers, sellers volunteered information about
the tortoises' "Red List" status and offered suggestions about how to smuggle the animals out of the
country.
Researchers counted close to 39,000 turtles up for sale over a two-year period at China's largest pet
bazaar, the Yuehe Pet Market in Guangzhou, according to a 2009 study published in Oryx. Nearly 20
percent of the world's turtle species were represented, including 30 species listed as endangered in the
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) Appendices I
or II. The study concluded that "the pet trade is a severe threat to turtle conservation and that law
enforcement needs to increase."