JOHANNESBURG — South Africa is a hub for the international pet trade, with thousands of animals exported each year. Many of these are exotic birds and mammals like parrots and marmosets, bred locally for foreign markets. But the export of reptiles and amphibians tells a different story.

Researchers and conservationists warn that some of the country’s native, and threatened, reptiles and amphibians are also being targeted for export due to a lack of international protection.

A recent study in the journal Sustainability analyzed more than 13 million records spanning nearly 50 years since 1975. It found that eight of the top 10 reptiles exported from South Africa were native species that included tortoises, chameleons, rock monitors and girdled (or sungazer) lizards.

“When compared with other [native animals], we are getting more wild-caught reptiles [exported],” says study lead author Ndivhuwo Shivambu, a zoologist at the Tshwane University of Technology.

In a separate study published in Animals, Shivambu and her colleagues found that out of 132 South African reptile species exported for the pet trade, only 71 are listed under CITES, the international treaty regulating wildlife trade.

“Many South African native species traded internationally are not CITES-listed, leaving them unprotected,” Shivambu notes.

None of the 19 South African amphibian species Shivambu and her colleagues found to be exported are listed under CITES.

One of those exported species, the western leopard toad (Sclerophrys pantherina), is only found in South Africa’s Western Cape province, where it’s already endangered by habitat loss. Known for its distinctive leopard-like spots, the toad is popular with collectors in the U.S., says Shivambu, though precise export figures are hard to come by.

Among the most sought-after South African reptiles for the pet trade is the giant girdled lizard (Smaug giganteus). This strikingly handsome species, which grows to a length of 40 centimeters (16 inches) and is covered in sharp scales, inhabits grasslands in the central Free State and northeastern Mpumalanga provinces.

Sungazers live in colonies with complex social structures. Individuals can live for up to 25 years, but only start breeding at around 5 years old. Breeding pairs only raise one or two offspring every second year. This slow reproduction rate, combined with threats to their habitat from coal mining and farming, make sungazers extremely vulnerable to overharvesting. There are virtually no verified records of the species being successfully bred in captivity, yet so-called captive-bred individuals are still being exported, says Ian Little, head of conservation at the Endangered Wildlife Trust.

Little says he suspects some reptile-breeding centers are capturing pregnant sungazer lizards in the wild, letting them give birth in captivity, and then exporting the offspring as legitimately captive-bred specimens.

“The numbers they have [in captivity], and the numbers they’re exporting don’t add up,” he says.

Reptiles are particularly easy to smuggle, he adds. “You can shove a lizard or a snake into a small container and shove that into a container ship — and they can survive for weeks in that sort of state.”

Shivambu and her colleagues found records indicating that more than 650 giant sungazer lizards were exported from South Africa between 1989 and 2014.

A 2020 study by Pro Wildlife, a German conservation NGO, found 74 species of lizards, turtles, tortoises and snakes, and at least nine amphibians, for sale in Germany and other European countries. Most of these animals were native, and some endemic, to South Africa. Among the endemics were 18 giant sungazer lizards, each selling for up to 1,750 euros (about $2,000 at the time), says Pro Wildlife co-founder Sandra Altherr.

Others included adders from the genus Bitis. A whistleblower told Pro Wildlife that at least three European smugglers (an Austrian, a Czech and a German) travel to Namibia and South Africa each year to seek out pregnant female Bitis adders.

“They come back with these animals hidden in socks, in their personal luggage,” Altherr says.

“As soon as these animals are successfully smuggled out of the country they can be legally imported into Europe, they can be sold openly and owned, and there’s no legal basis in Europe to stop this.”

The hatchlings from the smuggled adders are then presented as “captive-bred” at reptile expos such as the Terraristika in Hamm, Germany, or at Snake Day in Houten, in the Netherlands. Altherr has confronted traders at expos and asked why they’re selling snakes that are protected under South African law.

“They say, ‘Well, it’s not illegal here,’” she says.

Pro Wildlife is calling for tighter European legislation and stronger global protocols under the U.N. to tackle this kind of wildlife crime. Presently, Altherr says, “the EU is used as a laundering machine for those nationally protected animals.”

Janine Heim, a Ph.D. researcher in the criminology department at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, has found 16 out of the 18 known species of Bitis snakes in international trade. Yet only one, the Kenya horned viper (Bitis worthingtoni), is currently listed by CITES.

The trade in Bitis adders, which in Europe appears to date back to 1980, now involves captive breeding that has reduced poaching pressure back in Africa, Heim points out.

Austria, Germany, Switzerland and South Africa, for instance, are home to dedicated breeders who raise different species and meticulously document the process. But wild collection does persist, she says, and opacity in the trade complicates conservation.

“Practices like ‘province hopping’ in South Africa, where [wild-caught] snakes are moved from other provinces to KwaZulu-Natal [an eastern coastal province] to exploit its more lenient rules, very much blur the line between legal and illegal trade,” she says.

“Some Bitis with restricted ranges, like [the] Namaqua dwarf adder” — B. schneideri, the world’s smallest adder, found in coastal dunes in South Africa’s Northern Cape province and southern Namibia — “are potentially more vulnerable to overharvesting.”

South African conservationists urge the adoption of a unified national law to close these kinds of provincial loopholes.

“We’ve got nine provinces, and each province has a different [nature conservation] ordinance,” Little says. This allows provinces like KwaZulu-Natal to act as “a massive open door” for the trade of wild-caught amphibians and reptiles, he says. “We have to standardize the legislation across the country.”

Tighter regulations and closer scrutiny, both within South Africa and abroad, might just help protect animals that lack the prominence of rhinos and elephants, and whose disappearance from the wild could go unnoticed.

Banner image: A giant girdled lizard, also known as a sungazer (Smaug giganteus). Image by Cloudtail the Snow Leopard via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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Citations:

Shivambu, N., Shivambu, T. C., Nelufule, T., Moshobane, M. C., Seoraj-Pillai, N., & Nangammbi, T. C. (2024). South Africa as a donor of its native and exotic species to the international pet trade. Sustainability, 16(20), 8828. doi:10.3390/su16208828

Shivambu, N., Shivambu, T. C., Nelufule, T., Moshobane, M. C., Seoraj-Pillai, N., & Nangammbi, T. C. (2024). A snapshot of the global trade of South African native vertebrate species not listed on CITES. Animals, 14(19), 2782. doi:10.3390/ani14192782

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