Spotlight on trafficked herps: Adelphobates galactonotus ‘Blue’

A couple blog posts ago, I wrote this about trafficked herps:

“Some species are relatively easy to determine to be trafficked.  For example, if you see a captive specimen of herp endemic to Australia, you can be 99% certain that it or its progenitors were trafficked, since Australia doesn’t export herps for commercial purposes (with about a half dozen isolated exceptions that have yet to include any gecko or bearded dragon species).”

Another factor that makes it easier to determine if a species is trafficked is if it is CITES listed.  CITES — the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora — is an international treaty that regulates and records international trade in listed species.  If a species is listed but no CITES records of trade exist, then it can be known that examples of that species outside its native range state isn’t there legitimately.

One problem with this method is that some species may have been traded before they were CITES listed.  But when a new morph of an existing listed species is discovered, then every example of that morph that is legitimately traded internationally will have a dated record of that trade.  Or there won’t be such a record of legal trade — as is the case with Adelphobates galactonotus ‘Blue’.

The Blue morph of Adelphobates galactonotus was discovered in the wild in Brazil (to which country the species is endemic) in 2012.  According to Devin Edmonds, this morph was smuggled to Europe “first in the early-mid 2010s”.  Supposedly some were “confiscated by authorities” and “distributed to zoological institutions, which then bred the confiscated frogs and released offspring to European private collectors.”

Adelphobates galactonotus has been CITES listed (Appendix II) since 1987. If trafficked CITES listed animals were intercepted coming into a country, they would need a CITES permit to have left the range country (in this case, Brazil) legally.

There is no such permit on record in the early-mid 2010s.  If European authorities turned these frogs over to zoos, they were directly taking part in laundering them into captivity (as would the zoos that bred and distributed them further).  But another reasonable explanation of how these frogs got into captivity in Europe would be, of course, that they were simply smuggled there with no help from authorities.  That is: without documentation, the account involving the approval of authorities is best interpreted as fiction.

There is actually a relevant example of international trade of this morph recorded, though in 2017.  In this year, roughly 60 A. galactonotus were confiscated entering the US from the Netherlands with a CITES permit from the Netherlands.  The problem was that some of the frogs were the ‘Blue’ morph, which US import inspectors knew to have never been exported legally from Brazil.  The shipment was confiscated, and noted as such in permit records. (The frogs were held in the US and eventually repatriated to Brazil, again with a CITES permit.)

But this is the extent of permitted trade in A. galactonotus ‘Blue’.  Any other specimens in the US were imported with inaccurate and deceptive permits — AKA ‘laundered’ — or smuggled in some way (‘brown boxed’, or otherwise brought into the US with no permit at all).

About many trafficked herps we can only be 99% certain that they’re trafficked — but with an animal like Adelphobates galactonotus ‘Blue’, we can be 100% certain that none outside Brazil are there legitimately.  Hopefully, that makes them easy to refuse to buy.



https://medium.com/usfws/rare-splash-backed-poison-frogs-are-anything-but-blue-as-they-fly-home-to-brazil-f280bc469303 (https://web.archive.org/web/20240626195521/https://medium.com/usfws/rare-splash-backed-poison-frogs-are-anything-but-blue-as-they-fly-home-to-brazil-f280bc469303)