Common Dreams / Published on Wednesday, November 29, 2006 by the Inter Press ServiceStephen Leahy
In an ironic twist, officially listing a species as endangered drives up its value to collectors and consumers, putting it on an even faster track to extinction, researchers in Paris reported Tuesday.
A perverse human penchant for possessing the last remaining giant parrot, tegu lizard or lady's slipper orchid increases the value of the species so that collectors will spend thousands of dollars and go to any length, legal or illegal, to obtain them. This triggers a positive feedback loop between exploitation and rarity that drives a species into an extinction vortex, Franck Courchamp and colleagues write in the scientific journal PloS Biology. "It can be dangerous for a species to announce that it has become rare if it cannot be protected from exploitation," Courchamp told IPS from his office at the University of Paris-South in Orsay, France. "Even inconspicuous species can suddenly become valuable just because they are rare," he said. Hobby collectors, the exotic pet trade, trophy hunters, traditional medicine and luxury goods made from rare species are among the forces pushing rare species into extinction. And the scientific literature is often used to identify the next hot species, Courchamp found. Immediately after an article recognised the small Indonesian turtle (Chelodina mccordi) and Chinese gecko (Goniurosaurus luii) as rarities, their prices soared on the exotic pet market. The turtle is now nearly extinct and the gecko can no longer be found in its southeastern China niche. Exotic pet traders covet a wide range of creatures, including orangutans, monkeys, reptiles, birds and wild cats, as well as arachnids, insects and fish. The Internet is a major factor in driving species into extinction faster than ever, says Ernie Cooper, director of wildlife trade at the World Wildlife Fund-Canada. "The Internet makes it very easy for sellers to connect with buyers," Cooper said in an interview. A seller can easily and quickly sell 200 exotic salamanders on the net, which would have been very difficult to do a decade ago, he said. "It's just scary how fast a species can be depleted," Cooper noted. Two years ago, he found out that 50 Kaiser's spotted newts (Neurergus kaiseri), a threatened species endemic to Iran, were for sale in Canada. He traced the Canadian dealer to a Ukrainian dealer who was offering up to 200 Kaiser's spotted newts for sale. "There are less than 1,000 Kaisers left in only a few small streams in Iran," Cooper said. Although protected in Iran and collected illegally, it is not illegal to sell the Kaisers on the many amphibian collector websites. "If I hadn't stumbled on to the trade in Kaisers, it would have gone extinct before anyone knew," he said. The IUCN World Conservation Union's "red list" of threatened species now considers Kaisers to be a "critically endangered" species -- just one of nearly 16,000 plants and animals known to face a high risk of extinction. Not surprisingly, the collector's price for Kaisers has jumped from 200 dollars to 400 dollars, and some are still for sale today. The pre-eminent scientific authority on species at risk, the IUCN red list offers no legal protection for species, says Peter Galvin of the Centre for Biological Diversity, an environmental group in the U.S. state of California. Rather, it is up to countries to use their own laws to protect species and to list a species under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to make it illegal to trade endangered species, Galvin said in an interview. "If there are no legal protections, then it might be a good idea to keep secret the fact that a species has become rare," he said. However, in many cases a widely publicised announcement that a species is threatened with extinction is the only way to motivate governments to pass laws and take other measures to protect them. China adopted stringent measures to protect the panda only after worldwide public outcry following published scientific reports showing that the species was in trouble. "Most countries are embarrassed to let one of their species go extinct," Galvin pointed out. In the United States, species have only been protected after lawsuits forced the government to put them on the U.S. Endangered Species List -- or at least that is the way it has been under the George W. Bush administration, he says. "No species has been put on the list without a court order," Galvin said. That process can take years, leaving a species known to be rare without any legal protection. But keeping quiet doesn't work either, since species are going extinct at record rates, he said. "Publicly listing a species as threatened cuts both ways," Cooper agreed. However, he believes there are cases when it would be better to keep a species' status secret. It is probably already too late for the Kaisers. Even if Iran wanted to make it illegal to trade the newts internationally, the CITES process can take two or more years. And the looming extinction of Kaisers is not a top priority for Iran, Cooper said. Educating collectors on the consequences of their hobby -- driving species into extinction -- doesn't work for some because they tend to be obsessive personalities. "They are often experts who know a species has been collected into extinction but they must have it in their collection," he explained. Courchamp has conducted experiments on this human compulsion for rarity. "People are always interested in the rare," he said. "Even if two objects are identical, if you tell them one is rare, that one becomes their focus. It is a very strong tendency."
