The Nevada Independent by Daniel Rothberg,
8/27/17
Explore Nevada’s wild reptile removal restrictions, and you’ll
find some oddities.
Collectors can remove reptiles with their hands, but they
can’t use explosives. They’re allowed to use tongs but they can’t use a
jackhammer. They can use a noose or a snake hook or nets, but they can’t use a
crowbar or a tire iron or cans or man-made pits that could disrupt the desolate
terrain of the Mojave and Great Basin deserts.
Commercial collectors can remove an unlimited number of
chuckwallas but they must submit monthly logs of the species, sex and age of
their catch. They’re required to pay a $250 annual fee, must be a Nevada resident
and keep a transaction history of all sales, trades or barters.
With these conditions, all listed in the state’s
administrative code, the Nevada Board of Wildlife Commissioners has issued a
couple dozen permits to reptile collectors since the commissioners made the
practice legal in 1986. Licenses peaked at 31 in 1994, when registered
collectors took more than 31,000 reptiles, a number that has steadily decreased
since then. About 7,000 reptiles were removed last year, and now there are
seven collectors registered with the state, five of whom belong to the same
family.
Regulators at the Nevada Department of Wildlife have been
concerned about commercial collection, which is banned in bordering states. And
after two past attempts, the department is renewing a push to restrict the
practice, citing concerns about population loss and the possible use of illegal
traps.
The department is currently drafting two regulations, one that
would prohibit all commercial reptile collection and another that would limit
collections by criteria, such as season or species. Wildlife commissioners, who
set policy, are expected to consider the proposals in September.
But the department sees commercial collection as one of many
threats facing the roughly 50 reptile species in Nevada, said Jason Jones, an
NDOW biologist pushing for the regulations. Other threats to population size
include climate change, development and disease.
“It’s death by one-thousand cuts,” he said.
About 4.7 million U.S. households owned one or more reptiles
in 2010, but they often buy pets from captive breeders, according to a 2011
report prepared for the U.S. Association of Reptile Keepers, a
non-profit focused on responsible reptile ownership. This trend is not limited
to the U.S. A 2014
analysis in the British Herpetological Society’s journal found that 90
percent of U.S. reptile and amphibian exports — shipped to countries in Europe
or Asia — were captive bred.
For months, Jones has been presenting
this data at wildlife commission meetings to provide regulators with
context for where Nevada fits into the U.S. reptile trade, which brings in
about $1.4 billion in annual revenue, according
to estimates from the Association of Reptile Keepers.
Based on collection logs, he estimated that wild-caught Nevada
reptiles (excluding turtles, which can’t be exported from Nevada), accounted
for 12 percent of U.S. exports from 2005-2010. And Jones suggested that this
trade can be lucrative, with gopher snakes going for $380 in Europe.
Jeremy Bentz, one of the remaining collectors in Nevada, said
he was “laughing on the inside” when he heard that claim repeated back. “It’s
not a whole big money-making thing,” he said.
He said he collects reptiles on the side for a few months out
of each year, usually in April and May. His father collects reptiles full-time
and his uncle uses it as one source of income, Bentz said. “I do it as a family
thing,” he said during an interview. “It pays for my camping trip.”
The family has tangled with the department over commercial
collection before. In 1989, the family, with other collectors, sued the
department after its first attempt to prohibit commercial reptile collection.
That case was ultimately appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled in
favor of the department. Despite winning the case, the commission
backed down from the ban (the commission considered a ban again in 1998 but
ultimately allowed the practice to continue).
In its ruling, the Nevada Supreme Court said that it was
within the commission’s power to issue the ban — that the burden fell on the
collectors to prove that the practice did not harm wildlife.
That claim is at the center of the department’s argument.
At recent commission meetings, Jones has argued that
commercial collection poses an issue because it often overlaps with breeding
months, and populations are slow to recover. Looking at collection logs, he
showed the commission that in the Amargosa and Ivanpah valleys, collectors
have, at times, come back with fewer reptiles per day, despite devoting more
time to collection.
“Even with an increased effort, they had a very little
return,” Jones said at the
July meeting.
Jeremy Buntz said the department’s presentation was
misrepresentative of what he observed on the ground. He questioned how the
department defined effort, especially with a small sample size of collectors
who work at different paces and are not all collecting to generate income.
Jones conceded that the commercial collection data is not
perfect.
“It’s market driven,” Jones said. “But it raises a lot of red
flags.”
Other environmental groups have joined the department’s push.
Patrick Donnelly, who runs the Center for Biological
Diversity’s regional office in Las Vegas, argued collection can have “huge,
cascading effects on overall (reptile) population numbers.”
Donnelly said it’s especially concerning that the the practice
continues on public land managed by the BLM. A prohibition, he said, would
bring “Nevada in line with the rest of the West.”
He added that the commission, a nine-member panel appointed by
the governor and charged with protecting the state’s wildlife, could be
“legally liable” if it doesn’t act on the reptile issue.
Then there are questions of legality.
According to the department, there are more than 700 pitfall
traps in Southern Nevada. Pitfall traps, used for collecting insects or in
controlled ecological studies, are an illegal method for capturing reptiles.
The traps comprise small holes in the ground that blend with the desert. The
department has documented reptiles, mice and scorpions falling into these
traps.
Of the traps it checked in 2016 and 2017, it found that about
half of all reptiles and nearly all mammals that fell into the traps had died.
These traps are not permitted, the department said, and a number of them are
maintained by reptile collectors. In recent months, nearly 300 have been
removed by volunteers and solar developers, but they remain a concern for
regulators.
“There is significant mortality of reptiles due to large
numbers (700+) of unpermitted pitfall traps,” one NDOW administrator wrote in
a memo ahead of the July commission meeting.
The collectors said they used traps to catch unregulated
scorpions, a practice that is legal.
Doug Nielsen, a spokesman for NDOW, said there are ongoing
investigations.
