Global wildlife trade permeates the Tree of Life

Caroline Sayuri Fukushima,Stefano Mammola,Pedro Cardoso

doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2020.108503

Abstract

Legal and illegal wildlife trade is a multibillion dollar industry that is driving several species toward extinction. Even though wildlife trade permeates the Tree of Life, most analyses to date focused on the trade of a small selection of charismatic vertebrate species. Given that vertebrate taxa represent only 3% of described species, this is a significant bias that prevents the development of comprehensive conservation strategies. In this short contribution, we discuss the significance of global wildlife trade considering the full diversity of organisms for which data are available in the IUCN database. We emphasize the importance of being fast and effective in filling the knowledge gaps about non-vertebrate life forms, in order to achieve an in-depth understanding of global trading patterns across the full canopy of the Tree of Life, and not just its most appealing twig.

Highlights

Exploiting wildlife by selling it, their parts or products, is one of the most profitable activities in the world (Robinson and Sinovas, 2018; Scheffers et al, 2019)
Amphibians and reptiles are most commonly traded as pets, birds are traded both as pets and products, mammals are predominantly traded as products (Scheffers et al, 2019), while fishes are traded as human food (IUCN, 2019)
Several Divisions of Fungi are absent in International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and CITES (2019), preventing us to draw any inference about their significance in the global wildlife trade

Summary

Introduction

Exploiting wildlife by selling it, their parts or products, is one of the most profitable activities in the world (Robinson and Sinovas, 2018; Scheffers et al, 2019). The coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak might be the most recent example, since it is suspected to have its origin in Chinese wild-animal markets (Mallapaty, 2020) Despite this socio-economic importance, no comprehensive analysis of the global patterns of wildlife trade has been made. The only exception is for terrestrial vertebrates, for which phylogenetic signal in trading was detected and global hotspots of trade were mapped based on data mined from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species (Scheffers et al, 2019) Another recent study attempted to quantify the volume of reported trade globally, revealing that the volume of CITES-listed wildlife items quadrupled from 1975 to 2014 (Harfoot et al, 2018). Despite being global in scale, this analysis was biased toward vertebrates and a small fraction of plant groups, mainly orchids

Methods

Results

Conclusion