South Jersey marshes are a hot spot in the illegal turtle trade. Here's how it's policed – via Herp Digest

Avalon Zappo, Feb 13, 2019, Press of Atlantic City

To the trained eye, it was clear Kevin Courts and Michael Riff were illegal terrapin harvesters.

The Hatboro, Pennsylvania, men, one shirtless, were parked next to a marsh off Sea Isle Boulevard last July, with six nets and a long pole leaning against their green truck, the state said. A conservation officer who approached them spotted a turtle crawling under the driver’s side seat and found a cooler packed with hatchlings.

“They were dressed the part and driving the part,” said Jason Snellbaker, captain of the Division of Fish and Wildlife’s Bureau of Law Enforcement, as he described the incident Tuesday.

Riff and Courts, who each pleaded guilty in Upper Township Municipal Court to taking 21 terrapins and paid $2,000 fines, are the only people charged by the state since a bill banning diamondback terrapin possession went into effect in 2016, the Department of Environmental Protection said.

Officials suspected the two planned to sell the turtles on the illegal wildlife market, which spans the entire U.S. coast and is worth $19 billion annually, according to a report by TRAFFIC, a nongovernmental organization that monitors the wildlife trade.

New Jersey’s terrapins are stolen form marshes to be bought as pets, said Ben Wurst, habitat program manager for the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey. Smugglers also export them overseas to Asia, where they’re used as food.

“There’s always going to be somebody who’s looking to make money by illegally harvesting a species,” Wurst said. “There’s still a market for them.”

Diamondback terrapins, abundant in Cape May and Atlantic counties’ coastal marshes, are sold for anywhere from $8 a piece to hundreds of dollars for more ornate ones, Snellbaker said. An ex-journalist from Levittown, Pennsylvania, recently pleaded guilty to trafficking thousands of protected turtles from New Jersey and selling them for $530,000 over a number of years.

In 2015, the state temporarily ended its harvest season for diamondback terrapins after a federal investigation revealed a Hamilton Township man, Frank Mazzeo, allegedly sold more than 3,000 wild adult terrapins to a Maryland farm using a dredge, Snellbaker said. People were using loopholes in existing regulations to catch hundreds of turtles a day. A year later, legislators passed a law making the diamondback terrapin a nongame species and essentially ended that out-in-the-open practice.

“I’ve never seen a bill get passed that quickly,” Snellbaker said.

But enforcing the legislation is tough.

There are only four officers in Atlantic and Cape May counties to police each port and hundreds of acres of expansive marshes.

Another issue: Night is when turtle thieves usually come out. Headlights from conservation officers’ vehicles can be seen from miles away, and alert poachers to put away their gear, Snellbaker said. Sometimes, officers station themselves in areas known to be trafficked and simply wait.

Gathering enough evidence to prove poachers are selling the turtles also takes time, and court battles can drag out. After four years, Mazzeo only recently settled his case for $6,000, Snellbaker said. Mazzeo did not admit any wrongdoing as part of the settlement.

“There are hundreds of places it could occur,” Snellbaker said. “It’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time.”

Fines for skirting the ban can be up to $25,000 per day for each violation, but it is determined on a case-by-case basis. The state can look at any economic benefits the poacher gained while assessing penalties, according to the statute.

The public can help though, Snellbaker said. It was a concerned citizen who reported the two Hatboro men who were grabbing terrapins in Upper Township.

“We get calls from people,” he said. “It’s important the public keep its eyes and ears open.”

Any suspicious activity can be reported to the Department of Environmental Protection’s 24-hour action line at 877-WARN-DEP.

Shocking report details massive illegal turtle trade network – via Herp Digest

A series of recent sting operations has led to dozens of arrests, thousands of reptiles seized

More than a thousand Indian star tortoises, a species with strict trade limitations under international law, were seized during a recent sting operation.

 Go to the following for 2 detailed maps on smuggling routes.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/12/massive-turtle-smuggling-exposed/?fbclid=IwAR3ZUBC_zTx0oYdf-Z_kEU3eVz_czqgzvEQbNKHSbL9jua1iKgmxugV58EU

N A POSH hotel room in Kuala Lumpur, a 35-year-old man wearing a dark button-down shirt smiled. He had two suitcases crammed with 55 live turtles, and he was hoping to make a sale.

He watched as his customer, a man wearing shorts and sneakers, carefully examined the reptiles crawling across the hotel rug.

Bakrudin Ali Ahamed Habeeb, had posted on Facebook some seven months earlier that he had reptiles to sell, triggering a flurry of text messages and price negotiations. Now, Habeeb just needed to prove that his animals were in good health so he could pass them off into the exotic pet trade.

 It was May 2017, and he was anticipating a big payday.

When his visitor left the room, ostensibly to get a colleague, Habeeb didn’t even look up. But minutes later, agents from Malaysia’s department of wildlife and parks flooded his room. The would-be buyer, as it turned out, was an undercover agent with the Wildlife Justice Commission, a Hague-based nonprofit that works to expose the criminal networks behind the illegal wildlife trade. Local law enforcement officers had been waiting in the next room to nab Habeeb as he made an illegal sale of black spotted turtles, which are found in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh and are barred from international trade because of the species’ protected designation under international law.

Based on the evidence provided by the Wildlife Justice Commission and described in a report published December 6, Habeeb—an Indian national who had long been smuggling reptiles from India to Malaysia—was sentenced to 24 months in prison. He was one of 30 individuals arrested during a two-year investigation by the commission into reptile smuggling.

The investigation led to the seizure of more than 6,000 turtles and tortoises—many of them endangered species. Thirty people were arrested for smuggling these reptiles through Malaysia, India, or Bangladesh. Five of those individuals, all in Malaysia, have already been convicted and are serving prison sentences.

In the most extreme case, “over a thousand Indian star tortoises were seized in one sting operation in Kuala Lumpur, and two people were arrested,” says Sarah Stoner, senior investigations manager at the Wildlife Justice Commission and lead author of the report. One of those men is now serving 24 months in prison. The other failed to show up in court, and there’s an outstanding warrant for his arrest.

The commission’s investigations focused primarily on Southeast Asia, the pet trade destination for many of these turtles and tortoises, but it also encompassed areas as far-flung as Cameroon and the Netherlands. Collectively, according to the commission, the turtles offered to the agents were worth $3 million wholesale and much more on the retail market.

Dozens of investigators, analysts, and undercover workers found that in most cases the turtles and tortoises were being smuggled from India, Pakistan, and Madagascar to buyers in mainland China and Hong Kong. Top species offered included ones that are considered vulnerable because of their dwindling numbers, such as the Indian star tortoise and the black spotted turtle. Investigators were also offered more than 1,500 radiated tortoises—a species native to Madagascar that’s considered critically endangered and is prohibited from any commercial trade under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, the agreement that regulates the wildlife trade.

The report also revealed details about the scale and coordination of the corruption that greases these trades. Airports the animals were most often trafficked through were pinpointed, as were local sources of some of the reptiles. To do that work, the group used the plans smugglers shared with the commission’s “buyers”—describing how products would be moved from one area to another—and compared them against intelligence on meager arrest records at those transit points, essentially corroborating that someone was likely being paid to look the other way.

“People accept that wildlife crime happens because of corruption,” says Sarah Stoner, “but we want to put this information out there so people with levels of influence can tackle it at a higher level.”

The illegal turtle trade: Why scientists keep secrets – via Herp Digest

(AT https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59ygkd/how-to-remove-gps-data-location-information-from-photos is an article on how to scrub GPS data from your photos with videos)

October 22, 2017

The illegal trade in turtles is thriving in Canada and harming turtle populations. (Shutterstock)

Author-

            Jacqueline Litzgus Professor, Department of Biology, Laurentian University 

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under Creative Commons license.

I could tell you where I work, but then I’d have to kill you.

OK, not really; that seems extreme. But I might blindfold you if I took you there. Now you’re wondering what kind of work could justify such secrecy.

I bet you aren’t thinking “turtles.”

Turtles are in trouble. Some researchers have even used the term “crisis” to describe their plight. This turtle decline is a global issue, affecting freshwater turtles, tortoises and sea turtles. Two-thirds of turtle species are at risk of extinction.

After more than 200 million years of plodding around the globe unchallenged and anatomically unchanged, turtles could now be facing their final lap.

We’re their biggest threat. Turtles are crushed by cars and buried alive by bulldozers. Their habitats are whittled away by our insatiable appetite for big box stores and waterfront condos.

Their otherwise formidable shells were not designed to withstand these human assaults, because humans weren’t a threat when this turtle armour was first making its appearance in evolutionary time.

The World Wildlife Fund Living Planet Report asserts that populations of vertebrate animals have decreased in abundance by 58 per cent in the past 50 years. Over-exploitation, second only to habitat loss and degradation, is a major threat to animal populations.

Turtles are not excused from such exploitation, which includes unsustainable harvesting and bycatch during other resource extraction activities such as fishing. Turtles and tortoises are eaten with religious zeal, their eggs and body parts consumed under false promises of improved health, greater longevity and a better sex life.

Spotted Turtles concentrate at breeding sites in the spring making them an easy target for poachers. (Flickr)

Many species are collected for the pet trade. Their generally passive demeanour and amazing beauty have contributed to turtle declines, as these traits are highly valued in pets.

The reproductive adults collected from the wild for the pet trade are essentially dead, as far as the population is concerned. Take one from its habitat and the potential for future babies is gone. No babies means, eventually, no population.

Turtles are bet-hedgers. Once an individual gets past the dicey egg and juvenile stages, it is essentially immortal — barring encounters with any human threats. Individual turtles can live for decades, some for more than a century.

But the persistence of the population relies on adult females. A female’s reproductive lifespan is unencumbered by menopause; in fact, she gets better with age. Older females produce bigger and better clutches of eggs. But those eggs and juveniles are tasty morsels for numerous predators — most don’t make it to adulthood, although they do contribute to food webs in an important way.

But that’s OK. As long as the adult females survive, they can hedge their bets by producing clutches of eggs every year, banking on a payoff in a good year, so that each female replaces herself and the population continues on according to natural processes.

So that’s why I can’t tell you where I work. You see, you might be a turtle poacher. I trust no one, and I want my turtles to remain safe and sound in the wild.

Two of the species that my research group works on, Spotted Turtles (Clemmys guttata) and Wood Turtles (Glyptemys insculpta), are listed as endangered in Ontario, and are highly sought after by the pet trade.

One of the Wood Turtle populations in Ontario was hit by a suspected poaching event in the 1990s. I say “suspected” because no one has yet been able to prove it.

Here’s the story: 70 per cent of the turtles disappeared in a blink of time, and we didn’t find their bodies. The evidence suggested that their vanishing was not due to a mass predation event or a disease outbreak.

Word on the street is that some of those turtles are still alive in a basement in Ottawa, where they are being used to pump out offspring to be sold in the pet trade.

What remains of that Ontario population has been subjected to intensive and expensive management for 15 years in an attempt to bring it back from the brink of its projected extinction.

So how did the alleged poacher find out about the population? Good question, but hard to answer. Research began at the site in the late 1980s. The scientists thought their data reports would be safe in their desk drawers and bookshelves. But then came the internet and the digital age, and it became easier for the general public access to such documents.

The turtle trade has been compared to the gun and drug trades; it is that networked, clandestine and lucrative. Young, purportedly captive-bred Wood Turtles sell for hundreds of dollars a piece on the internet. Adults are hard to find for sale. They are often the wild-caught individuals and kept as breeders.

Within just a few years, two turtles can become dozens, and can net a poacher thousands of dollars in the legal trade.

Captured female Wood Turtles may be kept by poachers to lay eggs for years. Jackie Litzgus, Author provided

I recently attended a scientific conference focused, not surprisingly, on turtles. Even in this situation, surrounded by like-minded scientists and conservation professionals, my students and I keep our study site information under our hats.

Good thing. As I listened to other conference presenters reveal too much, I learned that there was, in fact, a previously convicted turtle poacher attending the conference. My MO of secrecy was unfortunately justified.

You just never know what lengths unscrupulous people will go to, so it’s best not to make things easy for them, especially when turtles already face a host of other harder-to-control threats.

So, I could tell you where our research sites are located, but then, of course, I’d have to kill you.