Abstract
The desire to own a pet amphibian is growing, and with it a growth in amphibian trade and in negative impacts on native populations, including disease transmission and invasive amphibian populations. We know very little about how or why people choose amphibians as pets, but amphibian owners share large numbers of videos on freely accessible platforms, such as YouTube. We aimed to use videos of captive amphibians to determine which species are kept, their life-history stage and the types of videos uploaded. We watched and categorized 1162 videos by video type, type of amphibian behavior and amphibian taxonomy (superfamily, family and species). We used data on the amphibian trade from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), on conservation status from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list, and on potential environmental impact from published Environmental Impact Classification of Alien Taxa (EICAT) records, to determine potential conflicts of owning pet amphibians. We recorded 173 captive species in 847 videos with a taxonomic overrepresentation of salamandroids and pipoids, and an underrepresentation of ranoids and plethodontoids. When compared to videos of wild amphibian species, videos of captive animals featured disproportionate amounts of adults feeding, being handled and moving. The videos watched had a smaller proportion of threatened amphibian species, but a higher proportion of invasive species, than would be expected by chance, with the proportion present in CITES appendices (18%) being non-significant. We suggest that such data can be used to profile potential pets for trade and attempt to avoid conflicts with threatened and highly impacting alien species.
Highlights
Few would deny that amphibians are fascinating animals
There has been a marked increase in research into the size and effect of the pet trade, but very little attempt to explain what drives it
In this novel approach, which reaches into the homes of the owners of pet amphibians, we found that people are most interested in amphibian behavior, especially feeding
Summary
Few would deny that amphibians are fascinating animals. Metamorphosis intrigued Aristotle (350 BP; Thompson, 1907) and other early philosophers, and continues to draw major lines of inquiry (e.g., Laudet, 2011). The subject remains in the curricula of primary school students around the world. Amphibians draw interest from a wide section of society for many other reasons, including their diverse body forms, reproductive modes, striking colors, advertisement calls and amphibious nature (Burghardt, 2017). Documentaries show a bewildering array of species with diverse behaviors in naturalistic settings to an increasingly urban audience (Wigginton et al, 2016) detached from the natural world (Miller, 2005). Is it any wonder that a wider section of society is becoming interested in having their own pet frog, salamander, or caecilian?
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