Despite the magnitude of the international trade, scant information exists on how many ball pythons are in the wild or how trade is affecting wild populations, which also face significant pressure from hunting for bushmeat, as well as from use in traditional medicines and other threats. Ball pythons aren’t classified as threatened with extinction, but a collection of new research suggests that perhaps they should be: It points to gaps in oversight of the supply chain in West Africa and raises questions about whether ball pythons should have more protections than they do now.
During the 1980s and early ’90s, ball pythons were seen as cheap and commonplace pet snakes, says Dave Barker, a trained biologist who with his wife, Stacy, started one of the first major captive-breeding ball python businesses. Then in 1992, the first “designer” ball pythons—albinos bred in captivity—went on sale. Suddenly the species “came from the back seat of the car to the driver’s seat,” Barker says. Demand exploded for ball pythons, which are now bred in dazzling colors and patterns.
Although commercial-scale captive breeding of these snakes has been established for several decades, ball pythons are also still the most common CITES-protected species exported live from Africa because they’re cheaper than their captive-bred counterparts. Under CITES rules, countries set annual caps, or quotas, for the number they can export legally, and trade should be allowed only if there’s scientific evidence showing that it won’t undermine wild populations. Togo, for example, has an annual export quota of 1,500 wild ball pythons and 62,500 “ranched” ones, raised from an egg or an egg-carrying female taken from the wild.
Neil D’Cruze, who has a Ph.D. in herpetology, is the global head of wildlife research for the advocacy group World Animal Protection, as well as a visiting researcher with Oxford WildCRU, a conservation research project at the University of Oxford, in England. Two years ago, he got curious about the trade in ball pythons.
Filip Sudak, in the Czech Republic, is a small-scale ball python breeder. Now one of the most common pet snakes, they exploded in popularity in the 1990s, after the first albino ball pythons were bred in captivity.
Photograph by Aaron Gekoski/World Animal Protection
“As somebody who loves reptiles and has spent many [thousands of] hours studying them, I get why you’d want to own one,” he says. But when he examined the trade data, he says the export numbers jumped off the page, leading him to wonder what’s being done to ensure that the trade isn’t a risk in terms of animal welfare, human health, and conservation.
Source link : https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/ball-pythons-west-africa-exports
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Publish date : 2020-03-23 07:00:00
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