The historical development of complex global trafficking networks for marine wildlife

Abstract

The complexity of trade networks is a major challenge to controlling wildlife trafficking and illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. These networks may not be modern inventions, but have developed over centuries, from integrated global markets that preceded modern regulatory policies. To understand these linkages, we curated 150 years of tortoiseshell transactions and derived biologically informed harvest models to estimate the trade in critically endangered hawksbill sea turtles (Eretmochelys imbricata). We find that trade networks concentrated in Southeast Asia harvested 9 million turtles, over six times previous estimates. These networks spread from within the Pacific, to the Indian and Atlantic basins, and became markedly more complex after 1950. Our results further indicate that the magnitude and extent of the coastally restricted hawksbill exploitation parallel current patterns of IUU fishing. Policies to combat these interlinked illegal practices should assimilate the important role of small-scale, coastal fisheries in these increasingly complex global networks.

Densities and drivers of sea turtle populations across Pacific coral reef ecosystems

“…Broad differences in densities across sites and regions provided a valuable framework to understand drivers of sea turtle abundance. Our modeling of these consistent and widely-distributed observations confirmed the well-known scarcity of the hawksbill sea turtles across a broad portion of the Pacific [8, 19, 30] and identified AMSM as a population of significance for hawksbills. Hawksbills were heavily exploited historically for tortoiseshell [8, 30] and of all the turtle species are most closely tied with highly-threatened coral reef habitat on which they depend for sponges and invertebrate prey [31].…”

“…Across all the surveyed sites, green turtles represented 90.1% and hawksbills 8.3% of observations, with the remaining 1.6% unidentified. This suggests that green turtles are nearly 11 times more abundant than hawksbills across the entire survey area, providing further empirical evidence of the rarity and conservation plight of hawksbills [8, 18, 30].…”

Coastal sharks supply the global shark fin trade

“…Figure 2 b shows that probability of origin declines steeply with frequency (note the log-scaled y -axis), as the niche models have focused the likely locations of shark fishing to coastal zones ( figure 2 a ). Small-scale vessels operating in coastal waters, however, present multiple complications for monitoring, including enforcement gaps, stockpiling and transhipment [ 5 ]. Progress on these persistent challenges within the EEZs of Australia, Indonesia, the United States, Brazil, Mexico and Japan ( figure 2 c ; electronic supplementary material, table S3) may be especially effective.…”

“…Scientists have long sought diagnostic tools to improve monitoring biodiversity in wild ecosystems and in markets [ 1 , 2 ] at a scale that matches their occurrence and exploitation [ 3 , 4 ]. Such tools could be vital for assessing the wildlife trade, where the species and geographic origin are often difficult to diagnose from traded products [ 5 ]. For shark fins alone, the trade is valued at nearly US$ 400 million and kills perhaps 100 million sharks annually [ 6 , 7 ].…”

Studying Illegal Online Trades in Plants: Market Characteristics, Organisational and Behavioural Aspects, and Policing Challenges

“…While official definitions of "wildlife" encompass both animals and plants, in practice restrictive notions of what constitutes wildlife are often used: some researchers explicitly decide to focus on animal species for moral reasons (for instance, because they want to stress that animals' purpose in life should not be providing resources for humans, see Sollund 2019). Other studies do so probably due to unconscious bias, as our Anglo-European epistemological traditions tend to devalue plant life as evolutionarily beneath that of animal life (Heywood 2017;Margulies et al 2018)-which can help to explain why, for instance, practices such as illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing are increasingly recognised as serious global environmental crimes threatening wildlife (Petrossian and Pezzella 2018;Miller et al 2019b), while plant crimes are still overlooked (consider, for instance, The World Bank 2018).…”