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288 IGUANA  •  VOLUME 13, NUMBER 4  •  DECEMBER 2006 COMMENTARY

The Chronicle of Higher Education
The gecko could have sprung from the mind of Dr. Seuss: It had
black spots. It had white spots. It had stripes upon those spots.
The nine-inch-long lizard with bright-orange eyes was new to
science in the late 1990s, when L. Lee Grismer, a professor of
biology at La Sierra University, first encountered it — but now,
doing nothing more than research, he may have indirectly wiped
out the gecko species from its home range in southern China.

Dr. Grismer simply described the lizard in a scientific jour-
nal, the Journal of Herpetology. He named it Goniurosaurus luii
and recalls thinking, “If we’re going to protect these animals, we
need to describe them and get them on the books.” To his dis-
may, “Within months of the description, these things hit the pet
trade with a bang,” he says. “These things were going for $1,500
apiece.”

Dr. Grismer has not returned to the site, but other scien-
tists have. “They say when you go to this place in southern

China, it looks like a bomb hit it,” he says. “The rocks are over-
turned, they’re smashed, you don’t have geckos anywhere.”

While poaching exotic animals is not new, Dr. Grismer
thinks that smugglers have become more clever in that they are
using scientists’ research papers to find newly described animals.
He is not alone in that concern. Three other scientists joined
him in a letter to the journal Science in May, telling the glum
stories of three new species, all quickly decimated by poachers
after their scientific description appeared in print. The letter
warns fellow taxonomists that their activities may actually harm
the animals they intend to study or to conserve.

C O M M E N T A R Y

Dr. L. Lee Grismer described Goniurosaurus luii from southern China in the late 1990s. Within months, these geckos were demanding high prices
in the pet trade.

Endangered by Research:
Poachers Mine the Scientific Literature for
Locations of Newly Discovered Animals1

Lila Guterman

1 Copyright 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education (http://
chronicle.com). Section: Research & Publishing; Volume 52, Issue
46, Page A12. Reprinted with permission.

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IGUANA  •  VOLUME 13, NUMBER 4  •  DECEMBER 2006 289COMMENTARY

The problem may not yet be widespread for new animal
species, but the researchers urge their colleagues to debate solu-
tions before it grows in scope. The issue is even forcing biolo-
gists to consider withholding information from publication —
a solution anathema to some researchers. “Science is a free flow
of information,” says Dr. Grismer. “I’ll be damned if I’m going
to have these criminals dictate how I’m going to do my science.”

Plants in Peril
The wildlife trade is a multibillion-dollar industry, but it seems
to have branched into newly discovered animals only recently.
Botanists, by contrast, have faced the problem for longer. “That’s
the unfortunate thing of discovering and publishing a new
species — it obviously brings with it the need for collectors to
have one,” says Geoff Bailey, a scientific consultant in
Manchester, England, who studies cacti as a hobby.

When scientists discover a new animal or plant, they nor-
mally collect one or more — legally, they point out, often going
through a lengthy permit process — to deposit in an institu-
tional collection. That animal or plant becomes the “type” spec-
imen, the representative of its species.

As hobbyists or poachers hunt for plants, says Michael
Chamberland, collections manager of the herbarium at the U.S.

National Arboretum, the area where the type specimen was
found often becomes the “sacrificial locality.” “One has to hope
that there are satellite locations elsewhere and that those are not
going to be revealed as widely,” he says.

Some botanists have concluded that to preserve species of
commercial interest — like orchids, cacti, and carnivorous plants
— they should publish only general geographical information,
rather than precise locations. For example, when the Wollemi
Pine (Wollemia nobilis) was discovered in 1994, in a national
park near Sydney, Australia, scientists kept its location a closely
guarded secret. Just a few dozen of the trees live in the wild, and
before their discovery, the species was known only from fossils
millions of years old. The Australian government restricts visits
to the site, and some scientists were even brought there blind-
folded.

Researchers rarely go to such extremes. However, botanists
often play it coy in their publications. Mr. Bailey says,
“Nowadays people are very guarded as to giving location other
than a very generalized statement.” Other researchers object to
withholding information in articles. W. John Kress, a research
scientist and chairman of the department of botany at the
Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History,
points out that habitat loss threatens far more plant species than
does poaching. “One hundred years down the line,” he says,
“when these habitats are destroyed anyway, having the records
of where these things were scientifically will be very important.”

The animal scientists who published the letter in Science
concur. “I believe very strongly that the conservation benefits far
outweigh the potential detriment,” says Bryan L. Stuart, the lead
author of the letter, who defended his Ph.D. thesis last month
at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He described a new sala-
mander that quickly appeared in the exotic-pet trade. In most
countries, legislation to protect a rare species requires that it have
a scientific name and that the government know where the
species occurs.

What’s more, even if they don’t plan to sample the organ-
ism, scientists studying the species need to know where it lives
(or lived) to determine how it evolved and adapted to its envi-
ronment, among other things. Rogerio Bertani, a tarantula
expert at the Butantan Institute, a biology and biomedicine
organization in São Paolo, Brazil, agrees, even though Brazilian
officials once caught smugglers with copies of his papers.

Dr. Grismer, who discovered the gecko, imagines taking
matters into his own hands. “I fantasize that just one time I’m
going to find one of these guys” taking a rare animal, he says,
“and I’m going to make an example of him. I may end up in jail,
but it would be worth it.” Of course, he realizes that violence
would not solve the wildlife-smuggling problem — and neither
would policing the areas, which costs too much for even the
United States to eliminate poaching from its national parks.
“The best thing I can come up with is an imperfect solution,”
says Dr. Stuart. He recommends that taxonomists delay publish-
ing their finds until they have worked with the government of
the country where the animal was found to develop laws to pro-
tect it.

Internet Insecurity
Once researchers describe a species, the information often goes
into online databases, which provide an even bigger security risk.

When the Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis) was discovered in 1994, sci-
entists kept its location a closely guarded secret.

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Finding articles in obscure research journals takes some hunting
by poachers, but anyone with an Internet connection can check
the online archives at many institutions, finding the origins of
the plants and animal species in their collections.

Scientists treasure that kind of easy access. For instance, com-
bining data from an entire region with past records of plant ranges
should help scientists predict how climate change could affect
plant populations, says Zack E. Murrell, an associate professor of
biology at Appalachian State University and director of a database
organization called the Southeast Regional Network of Expertise
and Collections. But curators of herbaria are debating how much
data to reveal online. “It’s very ad hoc,” says Richard L. Pyle, an
associate zoologist in ichthyology and the database coordinator
for natural sciences at the Bishop Museum, a museum of natural
and cultural history in Honolulu. “Every scientist and institution
makes up their own approaches as they go.”

Arthur D. Chapman, an independent scientist in
Queensland, Australia, hopes to get more scientists talking about
the issue. This spring, under the auspices of the Global
Biodiversity Information Facility, an international organization
trying to provide online access to biodiversity data, he conducted
an online survey of people who worked at botanical and zoolog-
ical collections. He found that most of the 102 who responded
said they did restrict access to sensitive data in their publicly
accessible data sets, using a variety of methods. He plans to pub-
lish the results of the survey and hold a workshop about them.

Working Together
While many scientists fight commercial collectors, some
researchers have taken a more cooperative approach. Dr. Pyle has
found collectors in his field friendly and useful. He studies coral-
reef fish. When an aquarium-fish collector finds an unusual ani-
mal, he says, “in almost every case they’ve deferred to science
instead of making a quick buck” by selling their specimen. The
money is no small potatoes: “Some collectors spend literally
$10,000 for a single fish,” he says.

In the late 1980s, a collector named Chip Boyle described
to Dr. Pyle two rare species that he had seen while scuba diving
off Rarotonga in the Cook Islands. He invited Dr. Pyle to see
them, stay in his house, and use his boat. The brightly colored
species turned out to be new to science, and Dr. Pyle described
them in the scientific literature, naming one Centropyge boylei
after the aquarium-fish collector. He also discovered a third
species while visiting Mr. Boyle.

With all three fish, Mr. Pyle had no qualms about describ-
ing their location. “You have to have high-tech equipment to go
to that depth,” he says, since the fish live some 300 feet below
the surface. Besides, he says, “they’re the most abundant species
down there.” But he acknowledges that terrestrial species are
another matter. When people discover new fish species, he says,
they usually reside in an unexplored area or deeper in the ocean
than taxonomists had looked before. “Usually the species is very
abundant wherever it lives,” he says. On dry land, different rules

290 IGUANA  •  VOLUME 13, NUMBER 4  •  DECEMBER 2006 COMMENTARY

Centropyge boylei occurs at depths of nearly 100 m near the Cook Islands in the South Pacific. Unlike other species featured in this article, it is not
in any way threatened by commercial harversters, and indeed was brought to the attention of scientists with the help of a commercial harvester.
Fortunately for the fish, its habitat is out of reach of most divers.

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IGUANA  •  VOLUME 13, NUMBER 4  •  DECEMBER 2006 291COMMENTARY

apply. For both animals and plants, says Dr. Kress, of the
Smithsonian museum, “99 percent of the common stuff has
already been found, so it is going to be things that are inherently
endangered and rare that are discovered and described now.”
And unfortunately, that very rarity can drive the exotic pet or
plant trade. “It’s like rare art collectors,” says Dr. Stuart. “The
rarer a piece is, the more desirable it is.”

Too Much Information
Scientists who find a new species of plant or animal face a diffi-
cult choice. If they follow scientific procedures and publish the
precise location of their find, that new species may soon be
snatched up by collectors, who are always looking for rare organ-
isms. Here are tales of three newly discovered species.

Bryan L. Stuart was horrified this year to find that a large,
colorful, warty salamander, which he had first described in the
scientific literature in 2002, was for sale online. He eventually

found out that German and Japanese collectors had hired local
people in Laos to collect the salamander, called Paramesotriton
laoensis, from the two streams where the amphibian lives. “It
has a very restricted range,” says Dr. Stuart, a research assistant
at the Field Museum in Chicago. “It’s being exploited before we
have any idea how abundant it is.” Dr. Stuart fears his paper in
the Journal of Herpetology led the smugglers to their treasure.
“All that’s been published is what’s contained in the original
description,” he says. The collectors may take so many animals
that the species will be in danger. “It’s very sad for the salaman-
der,” he says.

A “living rock” cactus species survived unmolested by
thieves for a decade after its discovery. The cactus, Ariocarpus
bravoanus, which blends in with its rocky surroundings in
Mexico, was described in 1992 in a scientific journal, with only
vague details of its location. But poachers later discovered the
site and by 2002 had removed almost all of the plants. Scientists
discovered two new sites where the cacti grew and did not pub-
lish their locations, but when Geoff Bailey, a cactus enthusiast
from Britain, visited in 2003, he and two others could not find
a single plant. “To all intents and purposes,” he says, “it’s virtu-
ally extinct.”

The 2002 discovery of a new “slipper orchid,”
Phragmipedium kovachii, in Peru set the orchid world buzzing
— the deep-reddish flower was twice the size of most other slip-
per orchids, which feature flowers with pouches. But that was
not all that got people talking. The plant was first brought to
light by a commercial dealer, who smuggled it into the United
States and made it available to scientists at the Marie Selby
Botanical Gardens, in Sarasota, Florida. The dealer and the gar-
dens were eventually fined for illegally importing and possessing
the rare flower. A year later, an orchid expert visited the region
where it lived and saw signs of substantial poaching. Four loca-
tions were totally stripped of the plants, and at one site, he found
seven large sacks stuffed with the orchids.

Paramesotriton laoensis, known only from two streams in Laos, is being
exploited before we have any idea how abundant it is.

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A “living rock” cactus (Ariocarpus bravoanus) survived unmolested for
a decade after its discovery in 1992. Poachers since discovered where
the species grew. Today, these cacti are virtually extinct.

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A new “slipper orchid” (Phragmipedium kovachii) was first brought to
light by a commercial dealer, who smuggled it into the United States
and made it available to scientists. Within a year of its formal descrip-
tion, signs of poaching were prevalent throughout the species’ habitat. 

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