< Illegal wildlife trade is booming. What does that mean for the confiscated animals?

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ANNOUNCER: You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

NATE ROTT: Shortwavers, what's up? Nate Rott, back in the host chair today-- or should I say co-host chair?

RACHEL CARLSON: Yeah, definitely co-host chair. How dare you--

ROTT: I'm sorry.

CARLSON: --because I am also here? Producer Rachel Carlson, hosting and reporting this episode.

ROTT: OK. So a few weeks ago, Rachel and I took a little field trip here in Southern California to the Aquarium of the Pacific.

CARLSON: We were there in the middle of one of many school field trips that day.

ROTT: But our field trip took us behind the scenes to see one of the aquarium's newest arrivals.

NATE JAROS: If you don't mind just putting the bottoms of your feet in a water bath there.

ROTT: OK, right here?

JAROS: Just slowly.

ROTT: OK.

CARLSON: With another Nate.

ROTT: Nate Jaros-- better Nate-- the Aquarium's senior curator of fish and invertebrates.

CARLSON: Very cool, Nate.

JAROS: So this is one of our areas that we hold corals. This would be the first stop of any confiscated coral. And a majority of what you see in these two lower aquariums and a portion of what you see behind me are all confiscated corals.

CARLSON: These corals were confiscated by federal or state authorities at a point of entry in the US because they were shipped here illegally.

ROTT: And we're not talking just a few.

JAROS: We've taken on nearly 500 pieces, individual coral colonies, this year.

CARLSON: 500 in the last six months. And that's just here in Southern California.

JAROS: It ebbs and flows. It's not always that rate. Clams have been confiscated in pretty high numbers recently. So there's a lot of different reasons that they can be confiscated.

ROTT: Every day at airports, post offices, and ports around the country and world, live animals are being moved legally.

CARLSON: Reptiles, fish, birds, mammals.

ROTT: All part of a legal wildlife trade that's estimated to be more than $200 billion annually.

CARLSON: But the illegal wildlife trade is estimated to be a multi-billion-dollar industry, too. And on a high level, that illegal trade causes problems for everything, from global biodiversity to local economies, to the balance of entire ecosystems.

ROTT: But on the immediate level, for authorities like Tamesha Woulard, the US Fish and Wildlife Service's regional supervisory wildlife inspector for the Southwest, there's an immediate question of caring for the animals that they seize.

TAMESHA WOULARD: What to do with confiscated live animals has been a concern for as long as I've been a wildlife inspector because the quantity, the care-- what happens after they're here?

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CARLSON: So today on the show, we look at a pilot project in Southern California, aimed at getting confiscated animals immediate and long-term care.

ROTT: And at a surprising new trend in the illegal wildlife trade, centered here in the US. I'm Nate Rott.

CARLSON: I'm Rachel Carlson.

ROTT: And you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

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ROTT: OK, Rachel, should we start from the beginning?

CARLSON: The airport?

ROTT: Oh, you know.

CARLSON: Let's do it.

ROTT: OK. So a few weeks ago, Rachel and I went to this massive warehouse at Los Angeles International Airport.

CARLSON: It's the place any cargo that was transported on a plane gets taken after the passengers and their luggage are taken off.

ROTT: And we were there with US Fish and Wildlife inspectors for what they call a live inspection.

ALI VENTURA: OK. So this is our coral shipment, you guys.

CARLSON: This is wildlife inspector Ali Ventura.

ROTT: And yes, she's heard every variation of a joke about her abbreviated name and title being A. Ventura, Wildlife Inspector.

VENTURA: And this is our fish shipment.

ROTT: Fish, OK.

CARLSON: Tropical fish that were imported, like the coral from Indonesia for the pet trade, by a federally licensed importer.

ROTT: So as Ali opens the box, she says, really, this should all be legal.

VENTURA: So box 1 has got a variety. It definitely has the Euphyllias in it, four different species of it.

CARLSON: Ali is pulling out brightly-colored stone corals. They're each suspended upside down in these plastic bags full of water. And they're hugely important for biodiversity, and super popular for home aquarium enthusiasts.

ROTT: Who knew? So Ali and the rest of the inspectors are shining flashlights on the coral to try to help identify them.

VENTURA: If what is inside the box does not match their packing list, we're going to seize them.

CARLSON: The whole thing?

VENTURA: No. What is over.

CARLSON: OK.

VENTURA: Mm-hmm.

ROTT: The US Fish and Wildlife Service does inspections like this and others with a dog, trained to smell heavily-trafficked wildlife, like reptiles, and animal parts, like ivory. His name is Braxton.

VENTURA: Mr. Beautiful, that should be his name.

CARLSON: Mr. Beautiful.

RAY HERNANDEZ: He's a pretty boy.

CARLSON: Yes, you are.

ROTT: I wish I could smell stuff like that.

HERNANDEZ: Yeah.

CARLSON: I know.

VENTURA: That would be awesome.

HERNANDEZ: I agree.

CARLSON: The other person in the background here is Ray Hernandez, Braxton's handler.

ROTT: Ray says they find stuff daily. And when they do, they often seize the animals or goods, and then have to decide what to do with the people involved.

CARLSON: Like, is it a species a person could import, but the paperwork is just wrong? Did the person buying it know it was illegal and do it anyway?

HERNANDEZ: If it's inside of a shoe box, tucked away in a shoe-- like, wrapped in tin foil and all sorts of other stuff like that-- you're like, OK, this is something that needs my attention, right? And we get a lot of that at the mail facilities.

ROTT: Tamesha wants to show us an example of that, a group of animals that were being illegally shipped, back at the US Fish and Wildlife Service field office, a short drive from LAX.

CARLSON: Walking into a small room in the back of their office building, we're warned of a bit of an odor. Unmistakably turtles.

ROTT: Oh, yeah, that's ripe.

CARLSON: It was ripe. Think, like, rotting strawberries, with wet, moldy dog food.

ROTT: Holy-moly, this is a lot of turtles.

VENTURA: It's a lot of turtles that are not going back to the wild.

ROTT: About 40 box turtles, native to eastern North America, where they're a health indicator species for forests.

CARLSON: And they're all just crawling around in these five shallow plastic tanks on the concrete floor of this Fish and Wildlife Service office.

ROTT: Tamesha's colleague, a special agent who's investigating the case, says they were seized about a week earlier at an international mail facility in a series of boxes bound for Asia.

WOULARD: They're collected to be sold as pets.

CARLSON: And we learned that a single box turtle can be sold for hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

ROTT: Big money.

WOULARD: These were smuggled. So not in the best condition because they were trying to keep them from being detected.

ROTT: Some of these turtles have mottled white splotches on their shells, a sign of sickness.

CARLSON: Tamesha says smugglers will often tape animals' legs to their bodies or sedate them to keep them from moving.

ROTT: The latest federal data from the US Fish and Wildlife Service shows that, from 2015 to 2019, an average of 27 live plants and animals were seized in the US every day.

CARLSON: And Tamesha says, today, that number is definitely higher.

WOULARD: To me, what was highlighted after COVID is that people will try to make money using a lot of different methods. And e-commerce has exploded, and there are people that are making pets out of animals that were never pets before.

ROTT: They've seized venomous scorpions, spiders, snakes,

WOULARD: Monkey-tailed skinks, they are large lizards, and they don't play well with each other. So this room is very small, as you can see, and we had about 50 of them.

CARLSON: A recent report by the United Nations found that more than 4,000 species are being targeted globally for wildlife trafficking, threatening, in some cases, entire populations of rare plants and animals.

ROTT: Which is why the most immediate challenge that Tamesha and other authorities face when they seize a trafficked animal is keeping it alive.

CARLSON: And finding it a home.

SARA WALKER: Oftentimes, if placement isn't found, an animal will have to be euthanized.

ROTT: This is Sara Walker, the senior advisor on wildlife trafficking at the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

CARLSON: She says it's often hard to return an animal to where it came from because it's not always clear where it came from. And it could carry disease.

WALKER: So really, the best thing for this animal, who comes in very sick, very injured, very stressed, as you can imagine, needs immediate care-- immediate care, immediate triage from a high-quality facility.

ROTT: That's why Sara's organization and the US Fish and Wildlife Service partnered to launch a pilot project last year in Southern California, creating a one-stop shop network, dedicated to finding housing for wildlife confiscated in the region.

CARLSON: At zoos, conservancies, and aquariums, like the one we visited with the corals and clams.

ROTT: Since August of last year, the network has helped place more than 1,300 animals in Southern California.

CARLSON: Including many of the turtles at the Turtle Conservancy in Ojai, California.

JAMES LIU: That's Bumblebee that's chasing you. This is The Dude, I think.

ROTT: James Liu is the head veterinarian at the Conservancy.

LIU: People also don't realize that they can feel through their shell. They have personalities.

ROTT: His little butt is wagging.

LIU: Yeah. So they like-- they love getting the backs of their shells scratched.

CARLSON: And since 2017, the Turtle Conservancy has accepted about 500 confiscated turtles, including about 100 box turtles in just the last year.

ROTT: James says this is all part of a broader trend, where people in Asia, who have always valued turtles as pets, traditional medicine, food, depleting their own turtle populations, now have the financial means to buy turtles from other places and other countries.

CARLSON: Like North America, which has the greatest amount of turtle biodiversity on the planet.

LIU: All those things together have created this perfect storm, where now, Americans are the people who are poaching and sending them to China, instead of traditionally you think of the reverse-- like, you think of poachers in Africa or Asia for trophy hunters in the US and Europe, right? It's totally backwards now.

ROTT: The Turtle Conservancy is taking in all of the turtles it can.

CARLSON: But the sheer number is challenging.

LIU: Box turtles can live over 100 years. And unless you can figure out a way to have other organizations step up, take them in, or, in a perfect world, start releasing them back into the wild, it's not sustainable.

ROTT: James says they are planning to release some box turtles back into the wild this summer for the first time ever.

CARLSON: And to help in the long term, federal officials and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums are trying to make similar regional networks in other parts of the country, with the hope of some day having a national one.

ROTT: But this is all just treating a symptom. James says, in order to actually solve the problem, the poaching of live animals, people need to stop participating in the trade.

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CARLSON: If you want to see photos of the turtles, the live inspections, and the rest by the excellent, excellent Ryan Kellman, please check out our story on npr.org.

ROTT: This episode was produced by Berly McCoy, edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and fact checked by myself and Rachel. The audio engineer was Gilly Moon.

CARLSON: Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is the senior vice president of podcast strategy.

ROTT: I'm Nate Rott.

CARLSON: And I'm Rachel Carlson.

ROTT: Thank you for listening to Shortwave, from NPR.

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