Since the dawn of civilization, humans have traded wildlife and wildlife products, such as ivory, shells, fur and feathers. Over the centuries, the trade has evolved, involving sophisticated networks, tens of thousands of species, and hundreds of billions of dollars in value. While well-managed wildlife trade can sustain livelihoods, the greed for profit has driven many species — at least 500, according to some estimates — to local and global extinctions.

In 1973, 80 members of the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, got together to prevent unsustainable trade in wildlife and signed a legally binding global treaty on the international wildlife trade called the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which took effect in 1975. Fifty years on, 185 countries are signatories to the convention, and more than 40,000 species of plants and animals are listed in its three appendices. CITES serves as a global database of legal trade in those species.

While most conversations around wildlife trade tend to focus on the illegal trade, the legal trade is at least 10 times higher in value. A 2022 CITES report estimates that the legal global wildlife trade is valued at $220 billion per year — almost half the value of Canada’s imports from the U.S. in 2023. Despite this significant value, experts say we have very little data to assess whether the legal wildlife trade is sustainable or not at local, regional or global scales. This is especially true for most species not listed on CITES, as their trade is barely documented.

A recently published study analyzed the magnitude of the legal wildlife trade in the U.S., which is one of the largest importers of wildlife, using data from CITES and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS) recorded between 2000 and 2022. It found at least 2.85 billion individuals traded during that time in the U.S., belonging to almost 30,000 species, half of which were caught in the wild for most taxa.

The study found that invertebrates were the most traded by numbers, with arachnids (spiders and scorpions) topping the list at more than 800 million individuals, followed by fish and insects. A quarter of all traded individuals were wild-caught, with more than nine in 10 marine and terrestrial mammals sourced from the wild, followed by birds, where at least 89% were wild-caught. Most wildlife was traded for “commercial” purposes, with reptiles topping the list, likely for the exotic pet trade. Many traded species, such as zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) and pythons, posed a threat to native ecosystems in the U.S. as invasive species.

The study is the first holistic assessment of the legal wildlife trade in the U.S., which has the most comprehensive data on wildlife trade for any country. Yet, as high as these numbers are, they’re still an underestimate, researchers say, as trade in many species isn’t captured. With most countries lacking comprehensive data on wildlife trade across their borders, it’s impossible to truly understand if the current levels are sustainable, they add.

In an interview with Mongabay’s Spoorthy Raman, study author Alice Hughes, associate professor at the University of Hong Kong, explains how little we know about the scale of the legal wildlife trade in the world, what that gap in our knowledge means, and why collecting data on the wildlife trade is key to sustainability and preventing biodiversity loss. She suggests moving toward a green listing, “where you proactively list what can be traded, because then you can do an impact assessment and develop a quota.”

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Mongabay: Why study the scale of wildlife trade?

Alice Hughes: Wildlife trade is a major driver of wildlife population losses and a major threat to species survival. One of the problems is that we don’t actually have as clear an understanding of trade as we might want. The legal wildlife trade is at least 10 times the volume of the illegal wildlife trade, and yet we don’t know what’s in it. If we don’t know what’s in trade, we don’t know what is at risk of going extinct. The fact that we see this huge volume of trade going on does require much better monitoring. Unless we get better data, we can’t regulate better. We can’t know where the vulnerabilities are. We can’t know where we need to improve regulation or monitoring.

This lack of understanding of what trade looks like means that governments are not motivated to collate and share that data in a standardized way, and they seem to ignore the fact that wildlife trade presents a major risk to species survival.

Mongabay: CITES, the global database of international wildlife trade, has been around for 50 years. Does it not collect enough data on wildlife trade?

Alice Hughes: CITES, which was basically created to try to reduce unsustainable trade, only has a subset of species. Most of the species in trade do not fall under CITES. CITES has only 9% of reptiles, while our study shows that over 45% of reptiles are in trade. About 2.4% of amphibians are in CITES, whereas around 17% or more are in trade. Not all records are at a species level, and there is still some amalgamation in groups such as butterflies, arachnids and reef fish.

LEMIS, while a more comprehensive database as it captures legal and illegal wildlife trade, is limited to data from the U.S. The EU maintains TRACES, which doesn’t collect data at a species level and is also not publicly available. While almost every country will have some form of system to track animals and plants that enter its borders, most of that data is not available, and there are no set standards. Unless we start having centralized standards, it might not tell us everything that we really need to know.

Mongabay: How accurate is the data that we have?

Alice Hughes: There are multiple underestimates out there. While the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services [IPBES] assesses that there are around 50,000 species in trade, we know that that’s an underestimate for many groups. I’m trying to separately collate that data on the number of species in trade, and the figure I’m getting is more than 70,000 species, which is massive. The reason that’s an underestimate is many people seem to have this fairly basic conception that we still trade animals the way we did 50 years ago, and most of it is for consumption or traditional forms of use, and that’s just not the case anymore. The ornamental market, which initially had orchids mostly, has now extended across the whole of the animal kingdom.

We also know from our previous work that markets for wildlife in different countries are very different. This means that just looking at the U.S. is necessarily going to be an underestimate of trade, and yet we still found more than 30,000 species in trade, which is a huge number. There still seems to be a singular lack of recognition of what the drivers of trade are.

Mongabay: How has wildlife trade changed in the last 50 years, and where are some gaps in our understanding of these changes?

Alice Hughes: There are now many more species in trade, particularly for groups that are traded for nontraditional uses, such as ornamental and exotic pet trade. The scale of the pet trade is absolutely massive, and that includes things like woodlice, which has a huge market with hundreds of species in trade. If there is heavy demand, you could be decimating those source populations, which are very poorly known. The consumer market either doesn’t care about their sustainability or is misinformed, with sellers creating a way of making it seem sustainable, but it’s all fiction.

In certain groups, such as the arachnids, people want to have as many species as possible, and collectors on online forums sometimes list hundreds of species. If these species have a small range, such as tarantulas that are long-lived animals and are fairly slow reproducers, the trade is going to damage their natural populations. Yet there is a complete neglect of these smaller groups in research and in regulation, and it’s something we really need to address.

Online marketplaces such as Instagram, Etsy and WhatsApp are now major platforms for several species in trade, and there is this gray zone of trade, which is just underregulated. Although Etsy and eBay have certain keywords around high-value items like ivory that are banned, it is still a long way behind for other groups. Trying to crack down on this on encrypted platforms, such as WhatsApp, is really difficult. The Metas and the Instagrams of this world are not great at safeguarding humans, so they really are not good at safeguarding other species.

All of this highlights the fact that we have a system that was created when dimensions of trade looked very different from how they look now. You can’t have a mechanism that is so slow in dealing with these trade trends that can change so fast.

Mongabay: Could adding these species to CITES as soon as they are found in trade not help?

Alice Hughes: The problem with CITES is you can basically only uplift species at CITES meetings that only happen every three years. If you describe a species in the year before CITES, you’re not going to have time to put together a compendium that trade might represent a risk. For species with small ranges that are attractive to trade, six years of unsustainable trade before being added to CITES could already wipe out their wild population and genetic diversity. If we know that unsustainable trade is a big issue for a species, people panic-buy them, expecting the CITES listing will make it harder in the future.

While listing on Appendix III, the lowest category of protection on CITES, is often put forward as a way to have a stopgap, there are so many flaws in its enforcement that it’s not actually a very useful mechanism for protecting newly described species.

There’s also a “chicken and egg problem” when it comes to getting a species listed on CITES. At the CITES meeting, countries to which the species is native make a proposal to uplist the species, and other countries say there’s no sufficient evidence that the trade poses a risk. If you’re not collecting any data on what is in trade, then showing that trade is a risk to the species becomes very, very challenging.

Species on Appendix II of CITES, whose trade is permitted but regulated, require nondetrimental findings, where countries need to prove that trade does not represent a significant risk to a species. But that process often doesn’t account for changes in the demographics or morphology of certain species. For example, the markhor goat [Capra falconeri] in Pakistan is held up as this flagship species of sustainable trade, but research shows that hunting reduces mean body size in species with big-horned males as they don’t get a female because they are on someone’s wall. We need to have more sensitive assessments of what trade is doing to wild populations, both in terms of population-level decreases and shifts in morphology.

Mongabay: What kind of a system do we need to robustly monitor wildlife trade to ensure it’s sustainable?

Alice Hughes: We need two parallel systems. First, we need to have global standards on the collation of wildlife trade data at the national level. Having that kind of data would help us flag high volumes of trade that warrant further investigation. It would facilitate CITES in making assessments of what might be at risk of trade by having a dynamic system. Given that CITES is still partially working on a paper-based record system, it’s very hard to flag those issues in real time. It would help CITES work more efficiently if we moved faster to e-CITES to enable more effective enforcement. Second, we need to have some way of encouraging more compliance by member countries.

If I had my preference, I would move toward “green listing,” or a reverse listing system where you proactively list what can be traded, because then you can do an impact assessment and develop a quota. Also, the enforcement officers have to recognize a smaller number of species, and therefore laundering is less of an issue. With inexpensive genetic barcoding technology available, CITES management authorities in a country could do a quick swab and verify the identity of species that are traded before it gets shipped off. By doing this, you collect data, you have affordability because the exporter would need to pay, and you’d be able to certify and know exactly what was in trade. It’s not that different from the way we ship most commodities today.

Banner image: A Burmese python (Python bivittatus) and an American alligator locked in in Florida’s everglades. Native to Southeast Asia, the pythons were brought to South Florida as exotic pets and are now an invasive species threatening native fauna. Image by Lori Oberhofer, National Park Service via Wikimedia (public domain).

Citations:

Michael Marshall, B., Alamshah, A. L., Cardoso, P., Cassey, P., Chekunov, S., Eskew, E. A., … Hughes, A. C. (2025). The magnitude of legal wildlife trade and implications for species survival. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(2). doi:10.1073/pnas.2410774121

Marshall, B. M., Strine, C., & Hughes, A. C. (2020). Thousands of reptile species threatened by under-regulated global trade. Nature Communications, 11(1). doi:10.1038/s41467-020-18523-4

Hughes, A. C., Marshall, B. M., & Strine, C. T. (2021). Gaps in global wildlife trade monitoring leave amphibians vulnerable. eLife, 10. doi:10.7554/elife.70086

Robla, J., Orihuela‐Rivero, R., De Smedt, P., Matarredona, M., & Garcia, L. (2024). A colourful world with a dark future: Unregulated trade as an emerging threat for woodlice (Isopoda: Oniscidea) of Spain. Insect Conservation and Diversity, 18(2), 161-176. doi:10.1111/icad.12792

Marshall, B. M., Strine, C. T., Fukushima, C. S., Cardoso, P., Orr, M. C., & Hughes, A. C. (2022). Searching the web builds Fuller picture of arachnid trade. Communications Biology, 5(1). doi:10.1038/s42003-022-03374-0

Coltman, D. W., O’Donoghue, P., Jorgenson, J. T., Hogg, J. T., Strobeck, C., & Festa-Bianchet, M. (2003). Undesirable evolutionary consequences of trophy hunting. Nature, 426(6967), 655-658. doi:10.1038/nature02177

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EnvironmentIllegal TradeMonitoringSustainabilityTradeWildilfeWildlife ConservationWildlife Conservation NetworkWildlife TradeWildlife TraffickingCITES