Rachel Nuwer

Within the cage stood the star attractions and source of the odor: four Asian small-clawed otters. Spotting us, the animals burst into chirps, whimpers, shrieks and screams.

After passing around a laminated sheet with warnings printed in Japanese, Mandarin and English (“Otters sometimes become violent”), a handler opened the cage. The animals bolted out and flew about the room, racing over laps and gobbling down kibbles.

Their tubular brown bodies felt like slick, furry throw pillows, and their animated, whisker-framed faces were like those of puppies. Selfies proved difficult: Throughout our 30-minute session, the otters never stopped moving.

Otters are smelly, loud and extremely active; they have sharp teeth and jaws strong enough to crack open shellfish. But in Japan, where more than a dozen animal cafes now feature otters, they have become sought-after exotic pets, displacing owls, slow lorises, sugar gliders and star tortoises.

Many cafes and pet shops sell otters to anyone interested in taking one home. “We’re seeing a rapid increase in demand as the popularity of keeping otters as pets keeps growing,” a cafe attendant told our group. “But the supply isn’t catching up.”

Pet otters aren’t just big in Japan. They also are increasingly common in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia. The internet has largely driven the “logarithmic increase” in their popularity and trade as pets, said Nicole Duplaix, a conservation biologist at Oregon State University and co-chairwoman of the otter committee of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

“Sellers advertise online, and pet owners post endless cute pictures of their little otter, which spreads the news that otters make wonderful pets, which they don’t,” Duplaix said.

Where are all of these pets coming from? Otters are difficult to breed in captivity without proper techniques. Many conservationists believe that the majority of animals sold as pets are captured in the wild.

In Thailand, a number of Japanese citizens have been arrested after they were caught trying to smuggle otters through airport security. In Vietnam, Save Vietnam’s Wildlife, a nonprofit organization that rehabilitates animals confiscated from traffickers, has begun receiving otters for the first time in the group’s 14-year history. The police delivered 10 otters to the group in November alone.

Threatened smooth-coated otters and endangered hairy-nosed otters, both found in Southeast Asia, are sometimes caught up in the pet trade. But Asian small-clawed otters, a “terminally cute” threatened species, tend to be the primary targets for poachers, Duplaix said.

All three species were in trouble long before the pet trade began. Pollution and development have destroyed their habitats, and fishermen and aquaculture farmers kill the animals to remove competition. Poachers also target otters for their skins, which are usually sent to China.

No one knows exactly where or when the otter pet craze began, but a number of experts believe it originated in Indonesia about five years ago, according to Vincent Nijman, an anthropologist at Oxford Brookes University in Britain.

Asian small-clawed otters are not domestically protected in Indonesia, but all trade in unprotected wildlife is subject to a harvest quota, and there is no quota for otters. This makes their commercial trade illegal without a special permit, Nijman said.

“We now see hundreds on offer on Facebook and Instagram, and none have permits,” he added.

Otter owners in Indonesia often join “civet lover” groups, online communities for fans of small carnivores. Members get together to show off their animals, Nijman said, parading them down the street on leashes on Sundays in Jakarta, for example.

“On national news and online in Indonesia, this has been presented as something acceptable, fun, novel and exciting,” Nijman said. “It’s for people who want something different than your normal cat or dog.”

In Thailand, trapping, selling or exporting otters is illegal, but the animals are freely traded online there, too. Penthai Siriwat, a doctoral candidate at Oxford Brookes University, monitored seven Thai-language Facebook pages from 2017 to early 2019, and found 572 individual animals for sale.

“It’s just been increasing,” she said. Over half the otters for sale in Thailand are litters of newborns that have not yet opened their eyes, Siriwat reported in the Journal of Asia-Pacific Biodiversity.

The rest are mostly juveniles weaned on cat food, which sellers claim are guaranteed to live and thus are more expensive.

“Young otters are often taken from the wild while their mother is killed trying to defend her litter,” said Paul Yoxon, head of operations at the International Otter Survival Fund, a nonprofit group based in Scotland. “The fact that there are so many newborns available also suggests that traders have no concern as to whether the animals survive or not.”

The otter trade has spread from Thailand, most notably to Japan. According to Traffic Japan, a group monitoring the illegal wildlife trade, a popular television series helped kick off the trend by featuring a pet otter. Social media stars followed up with videos of visits to otter cafes, some of which have gotten millions of views.

“The problem with otters is that just normal people, even my friends, are now interested in keeping them as pets,” said Yui Naruse, a researcher at Traffic Japan. “We have this cuteness culture that is really deeply rooted in Japan, and that plays a strong role in this trend.”

In 2018, Naruse and her colleagues conducted an online survey and found 85 otters for sale around Japan. Nearly half the retailers claimed that their animals were captive-bred in Japan.

But Naruse and her colleagues found no evidence of captive breeding in the country, strengthening their suspicion that otters are being smuggled in from abroad. (Japan’s native otter subspecies was declared extinct in 2012.)

According to Traffic’s research, 70 percent of otters seized in Southeast Asia in 2017 were destined for Japan; authorities seized at least 39 otters coming into Japan or bound for the country from 2016 to 2017. In a widely publicized case in October last year, a Tokyo district court prosecuted two men for smuggling five baby otters into Tokyo from Thailand.

Suspicious origins

Police were tipped off to the case by Yoshiaki Nagayasu, owner of Kotsumate, a popular otter cafe with branches in Tokyo, Nagoya and Fukuoka. One of the smugglers had called Nagayasu, offering to sell him baby otters. Suspecting foul play, Nagayasu called the police.

Speaking at his Tokyo cafe location, where walls are lined with autographed photos of Japanese YouTube and television celebrities, Nagayasu said that his otters come from a breeding facility he founded in Malang, Indonesia, which he claimed received otters rescued from the illegal trade and bred them.

The strongest offspring are released into the wild, he said, and the rest are sent to Japan, where Nagayasu sells them for more than $10,000 each. All profits go back to Indonesia for facility maintenance and conservation of wild otters, he said.

“If we didn’t do this business, all the otters you see here right now would probably be dead,” Nagayasu said.

But on the ground at Kebun Alam Jaya, Nagayasu’s facility in Indonesia, there is little evidence of conservation, according to the Scorpion Wildlife Trade Monitoring Group, a nonprofit organization based in Medan, Indonesia, and the International Otter Survival Fund.

“One of the workers at the facility told me they got otters from around the area, from the wild,” said Gunung Gea, executive director of Scorpion.

Photographs taken by Gea show adult otters in tiny wire cages and cement pits lacking adequate nest boxes in which to have cubs. All the animals appeared to have been caught in the wild, according to Jason Palmer, curator of collections at New Forest Wildlife Park in Britain and an adviser to the IUCN.

“This place looks very suspicious, like nothing more than a holding facility for animals for sale,” Palmer said. “Nothing indicates a rescue and rerelease or breeding center, and even if it did, the otters do not have the care or the environment to ensure they would survive in the wild.”

Nagayasu said he has paperwork proving that all the adult otters in his facility are rescues that the Indonesian government seized from the illegal wildlife trade. He declined to share the paperwork with a reporter for The Times, referring her instead to the Indonesian government.

Indonesian government officials did not respond to requests for comment. According to Traffic’s Southeast Asia office, Indonesia seized just eight otters from 2015 to 2017. Gea counted 16 adult animals during his visit to Kebun Alam Jaya.

Nagayasu added that he legally imported his otters into Japan. Soon that may no longer be possible.

In May, international representatives will vote on whether to give short-clawed and smooth-coated otters the highest level of protection at a meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

If the proposals pass, international commercial trade of wild otters would be banned.

While increased protection under CITES would be a boon for otters, it would not end the illegal trade, said Daniel Willcox, science adviser to Save Vietnam’s Wildlife. Corruption and enforcement challenges create obstacles, enabling many species fully protected by CITES to still be sold illegally.

“There’s no way we can completely get rid of pet trade,” Willcox said.

Given that, Willcox believes that conservationists should try to work directly with otter owners.

“In a county like Vietnam, it’s much better that people are keeping otters rather than eating them,” Willcox said. “Some of these people really care about their animals, and if we can find a way to engage with them to show them why keeping otters is wrong, they can become advocates for wildlife conservation.”

Given a chance, otters and people still can coexist, even in crowded Southeast Asia, said Sivasothi N, a biologist at the National University of Singapore.

By the mid-1980s, Singapore’s otters had disappeared because of pollution and development. After the nation began a cleanup campaign, the animals slowly returned.

Now, 11 otter families live on the island. Their 80-odd members benefit from strictly enforced anti-poaching laws, Sivasothi said, and from widespread public support.

“There’s something about otters moving together as a family — squeaking, diving and catching fish — that really excites people,” Sivasothi said. “Singaporeans are beginning to look at the water again.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="cd3de5ef-478b-4757-8522-a5008381fcf6" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/science/asia-otters-pets-japan.html">The New York Times</a>.

These Otters Are Popular Pets in Asia. That May Be Their Undoing.

(Science Times): TOKYO — We smelled them before we saw them. Amid an overwhelming reek of urine and scat, we descended a tight staircase into a cramped basement, where tattered ottomans faced a small wire cage.

These Otters are popular pets in Asia, that may be their undoing

While the male of the species was an unremarkable brown, the female had eye-catching, electric blue legs.

New spiders are discovered all the time, and the paper likely would have gone largely unnoticed — were it not for an article in Science magazine that appeared soon afterward.

The article claimed that the tarantula researchers had received their specimens secondhand from private collectors in Poland and Britain, who had poached them in Malaysia.

Neither Ray Gabriel nor Danniella Sherwood, the authors of the study, responded to email requests for comment. But Peter Kirk, chairman of the British Tarantula Society and editor of the society’s journal, said the collectors had shown the scientists an import permit from Poland, and they “had no reason to think due process wasn’t followed.”

“The paper absolutely will not be retracted, because it’s a completely legitimate published paper,” he said.

The incident has reignited a decades-old debate among scientists and hobbyists alike about research ethics, specimen collection and “biopiracy” — the use of natural resources without obtaining permission from local communities or sharing any benefits with them.

“The majority of responses I’ve seen are people saying, ‘Yes, we need to stop this,’ but there’s also been a fair amount of people basically trying to justify the poaching and smuggling of these tarantulas,” said Ernest Cooper, a conservation consultant in British Columbia.

“It’s this very strange, slightly colonial attitude of, ‘We know better than developing countries, so their laws don’t matter.’”

Illegal wildlife trade is dominated by headlines about criminal cartels trafficking in ivory, rhino horn and pangolin scales. But scientists can also be complicit in illegal trade by poaching specimens themselves or by working with those who do.

This type of wildlife crime occurs on a much smaller scale, but experts in a variety of fields believe it is a significant issue.

“It’s a problem globally, and it happens a lot,” said Sérgio Henriques, chairman of the spider and scorpion group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “I know for a fact that researchers linked to academia have purchased or collected specimens in a nonlegal way.”

For Henriques and others, this sort of collection raises deep ethical concerns. “We’re the scientists, the ones who are supposed to know better and who should be leading by example,” he said. “If we can’t follow the rules, why are we demanding that others do?”

The problem is likely to intensify, some conservationists believe. “Scientists do collect illegally, and normally this is not a huge problem, because scientists who study cactuses, for example, are a small community,” said Pablo Guerrero, a botanist at the University of Concepción in Chile.

“But every year we have more and more scientists working around the globe, and every year species are becoming more and more endangered.”

Other experts argue that scientific misconduct of this sort barely registers among the tremendous threats facing wildlife today.

“The fact is that people make a big thing out of this tarantula or whatever else it is instead of making a case out of the need to protect where this animal lives, which no one does,” said Heiko Bleher, an independent freshwater fish expert who has researched and collected specimens in 218 countries.

No one knows how prevalent illegal collecting and use of poached specimens is among scientists, not only because of the covert nature of this trade, but also because it can be difficult to define who counts as a scientist and what counts as breaking the law.

Expert-level hobbyists often publish in the scientific literature, for example. But because they are not employed by a university or research institute, they are not subject to strict codes of conduct and may be more prone to cut corners, Cooper said.

In their paper, Gabriel and Sherwood said they were affiliated with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. But Paul Smith, director of the museum, said that neither are employees: Gabriel is an honorary associate, and Sherwood was a volunteer.

“The research was carried out independently and is not connected with the museum in any way,” Smith said. The paper would have failed to pass the museum’s ethics review, which requires authors to provide proof of legality of their specimens, he added.

The ethics surrounding scientific acquisitions can be hazy. Still, some cases are clearly criminal.

In 2005, for example, a curator of the Charles University Botanical Garden in Prague was convicted in South Africa of collecting more than 3,000 protected plants, cuttings and seeds in the Western Cape, according to case records.

In 1999, Earl Thomas Schultz, former curator of herpetology at the San Diego Zoo, pleaded guilty to fraud and theft after being caught trafficking in imperiled reptiles.

“Sometimes it seemed like I specialized in targeting scientists who felt they were above the wildlife conservation laws,” said Ken McCloud, a retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service special agent who investigated the latter case.

In other instances, though, “there are extensive gray areas, and it’s as much a matter of ethics as it is of legality,” said Peter Paul van Dijk, a conservation biologist at Global Wildlife Conservation, a nonprofit group in Austin, Texas.

For example, many museum specimens — especially ones collected decades ago — have murky origins. “There’s still an idea that the ends justify the means in terms of describing some of these specimens,” said Lisa Buckley, a paleontologist at the Peace Region Paleontology Research Center in British Columbia. “That’s an attitude that really needs to die a flaming death.”

Other scientists have no such compunction. “We all have different ethical standards, and mine are rock bottom,” said David Martill, a paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth in Britain.

In 2015, Martill made headlines after stumbling across a 113 million-year-old Brazilian fossil in a German museum and realizing it constituted the world’s first known four-legged snake.

Shortly after the news broke, Brazilian officials began an investigation, citing laws enacted in 1942 forbidding the export of all fossils from the country. Martill stands by his decision to publish.

“This is a really interesting, fascinating fossil, and I think the world should know about it,” he said. But living animals are another matter altogether: “There are organisms that are so rare and threatened that sometimes radical protection measures are needed.”

Those protections differ from country to country, and scientists often get bogged down in confusing bureaucracy and lengthy waits. Some countries go so far as to forbid export entirely, especially of newly discovered species.

“Brazil has imposed regulations that are simply insane,” Bleher said. “They require you to deposit your materials wherever they tell you, so you have specimens that have been sitting for years in institutions in Brazil and no one is working on them.”

Researchers have long complained that Brazil’s regulations — originally set up to ensure the country receives adequate recognition and compensation for pharmaceutical discoveries — impede science.

While some researchers simply give up, others travel on tourist visas and undertake collections without a permit. “Most field-working entomologists have some experience with this,” said Petr Svacha, an entomologist at the Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic. “Believe me, it is frustrating to do useful work while hiding like a criminal.”

In 2008, Svacha and a friend spent a month in prison in India after being accused of collecting insects without a permit in Singalila National Park. More than 1,200 scientists, including many from India, protested their arrest, arguing that it was a draconian application of the law.

In the end, Svacha paid a fine and his friend, who was sentenced to three years in prison, fled the country before his appeal.

Wildlife laws are generally designed with vertebrates in mind, but unlike tigers and elephants, most insects are composed of huge populations that will not be affected by even heavy collection, Svacha said.

“When applied to insects, prohibitive conservation rules designed to protect individual animals become nonsensical and do not help anything,” he said. “Under that circumstance, I will do everything possible to circumvent these rules, and I do not feel guilty.”

Svacha added that, like most entomologists he knows, he also readily works with specimens that he obtains from hobbyists and commercial sellers. Whether or not these specimens were collected legally is not something he asks about, he said, “because it is absolutely unimportant.”

This is the posture of researchers in other fields as well, who study fossils smuggled out of China or reptiles trafficked out of Indonesia. The ethics of working with such specimens can quickly become blurred.

As van Dijk put it, “If all you need is a little blood sample and you go to a friendly hobbyist down the road and take a few drops of blood from a captive animal, would you really go through due diligence of making sure that animal was properly collected?”

In the future, Kirk said, the Journal of the British Tarantula Society will require authors to provide a copy of their permits if their manuscript deals with specimens from another country, as many other publications do.

The society will also prohibit the sale of the new blue tarantula at its annual exhibition, he said. (The species is already being advertised online in Europe and the United States for as much as $450 each.)

Henriques would like to see the creation of a website managed by a trustworthy global organization, on which each country outlines its legislation and application process for specimen collection and export.

The same site could serve as a repository for previously issued permits, he said, allowing researchers, museums, governments and journals to verify any given permit or specimen.

“I personally think it’s good that the blue tarantula case got the attention that it did, because it ignited interest in this topic,” Henriques said. “We need to try to keep the conversation going so we can use this as a chance to find solutions.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="ecec1d58-3692-411c-9d6b-b0004960b947" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/science/poaching-wildlife-scientists.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Science Times): In February, the Journal of the British Tarantula Society published a paper describing a new species of tarantula, which was discovered in a national park in Sarawak, Malaysia.

When the poacher is a scientist

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Rachel Nuwer

Articles written by the author

These Otters are popular pets in Asia, that may be their undoing

When the poacher is a scientist