A New Reptile Is Discovered, and Ten Poachers Book Flights to. . .
Craig Stanford
If you think the above title is hyperbole, think again. Newly described reptile species—especially turtles—are among the world’s most trafficked animals. Turtle conservation conferences no longer allow speakers to display locality information or accurate maps of where endangered turtles live for fear that certain attendees in the audience may be there to gather information that allows to illegally collect protected animals. Naïve turtle enthusiasts proudly post photos of animals they’ve discovered in the wild, and if the GPS location stamp is on the image, the next morning that location is swarming with collectors. Friendly foreigners turn up in developing countries offering money and even rare turtles they’ve smuggled into the country to in order to bribe local people who might lead them to rare species that they could smuggle, sell, or add to their private collections.
It may surprise you that we are still discovering new species in 2026. Advances in molecular genetics can sometimes allow us to recognize that what we long regarded as one species should properly be considered two or more separate species. But it is true that altogether new species are still being discovered. In 2018, the Mexican biologist Marco Lopez-Luna and his colleagues formally described a tiny mud turtle living in ponds and ditches within the city limits of Puerto Vallarta, one of Mexico’s top beach resorts on its Pacific coast. The newly named Vallarta mud turtle’s entire population is estimated to be only several hundred. It’s a diminutive muddy brown turtle, utterly nondescript except for a lemon yellow nose spot. Within weeks of the published article announcing the discovery, poachers descended on Puerto Vallarta, searching for turtles in roadside swamps beneath the flight path of commercial jets landing at the nearby international airport.
A turtle on the brink of extinction is worth far more to collectors compared to more common species.
There are two quite different categories of smugglers. First, there are commercial smugglers, whose bottom line is nothing more than maximum financial profit. The potential payoff from poaching and smuggling many protected species, some of which sell for many thousands of dollars on the global black market, is well worth the risk of arrest, fines, and/or imprisonment. To these people, turtles are simply valuable commodities, and a newly announced species is fair game for those who are not only immoral enough to care little about extinction risk but actually profit from it. A turtle on the brink of extinction is worth far more to collectors compared to more common species. In a perversion of human nature, the rarity of a coin, a car, or a turtle boosts its market value astronomically. In the case of the Vallarta mud turtle, the smuggling circuit is well known to run from the ditches and ponds of Puerto Vallarta to Hong Kong, where a network of unscrupulous animal dealers send the animals on as quickly as they can find buyers.
The second type of poacher and smuggler is the obsessive collector. The scale of their smuggling efforts may be lower, but the determination to defy international treaties and laws is equally sinister. Such individuals are determined to add newly described or critically rare species to their private collections at any cost. Their modus operandi is always the same: They claim that the species will disappear without their intervention, and that they will perfect its captive breeding in their own collection, saving it from sure extinction. The reality is almost always something else. Of the world’s more than 360 turtle and tortoise species, only a handful are better off in captivity than in the wild. The trade of captive bred turtles may even stoke more collecting from the wild. Claiming the high moral ground is a rationale used by obsessive collectors to ignore any laws and international treaties in their efforts to get the turtles of their dreams.
Within days of the announcement, unscrupulous individuals will descend upon the location in hopes of catching, smuggling, and selling as many of the new creature as they can.
Enter the non-profit organizations. Many endangered species have global non-profit organizations devoted to their conservation. The turtle community is fortunate to have several, mainly based in North America and Europe. In theory, these organizations could coordinate their work to maximize the conservation benefit to the species whose survival it is their mission to ensure. In practice? Not so much. Having lectured about wildlife conservation for decades, I repeatedly have experienced the shock of audiences when I describe the cutthroat competition between rival conservation organizations over their efforts to save critically endangered species. For example, in my work with mountain gorillas in East Africa, I was told by one chapter of a major non-profit organization that they might consider funding my African doctoral student’s work on the gorillas. Unless, of course, if I so much as spoke with their archrival, which happened to be another nation’s chapter of the very same organization.
Funding is always limited in the non-profit world, but the squabbles are not necessarily about money. They are about territory, bragging rights, and the desire to control access to and protection of the turtle species in question. Such has been the case the world over, and it never results in a positive conservation outcome. Returning to the case of the Vallarta mud turtle, this has played out in grand style—to the detriment of the turtles. Instead of coordinating actions, foreign non-profits try to undermine each other’s access to them, each claiming the right to be the power player. A series of thefts and smuggling incidents owing to shoddy planning and naïve security measures left dozens of the little mud turtles in the hands of animal dealers in Hong Kong, and they are now almost certainly in the apartment aquariums of collectors in China. Meanwhile the majority of the remaining captive population of the species is being held at the Guadalajara Zoo. The black market value of the turtle has thus skyrocketed, and now the best way to safeguard its future and avoid a catastrophic theft or epidemic to the whole group is to split it among multiple smaller collections in various secure locations in Mexico. Whether the various squabbling factions involved can come to a coordinated plan that benefits the turtles’ future and not just the pride of the people involved is an open question.
Craig Stanford is professor of biological sciences and anthropology at the University of Southern California, and the author of Cold-Blooded Murder: Reptiles and Amphibians on the Brink of Extinction.
