Fighting butterfly poachers

[Guest guest]

*> " International insect trade is a little-known, but environmentally

destructive business. Each year, hundreds of thousands of butterflies, moths

and beetles are caught in many countries and sold to private collectors in

the West, mostly in Germany " <

 

>** " The next major battlefield in the war on insect trade will be China.

Expeditions from Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Czech Republic and Japan have

already established smuggling routes in Tibet and Manchuria " <*

 

Link: http://dinets.travel.ru/parnassius.htm*

 

Fighting butterfly poachers

*

International insect trade is a little-known, but environmentally

destructive business. Each year, hundreds of thousands of butterflies, moths

and beetles are caught in many countries and sold to private collectors in

the West, mostly in Germany. Gangs of professional butterfly hunters

organize expensive expeditions, sometimes hire local people, and use all

possible methods of collecting their target species in large numbers. They

use special sources of ultraviolet light, chemical baits, and sometimes cut

down large trees to get caterpillars from the forest canopy. Their

activities attract little attention, because in Third World countries only

large animals are generally considered to be in need of protection. The more

rare is the species, the higher is the market price; so a butterfly can be

hunted into extinction within just a few years. Some of the poachers make

special efforts to hunt a species to complete extinction - in this case, the

price for each specimen will be astronomical.

 

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the mountains of Central Asia became

the prime target for butterfly hunters. Here the most prized genus, *

Parnassius*, reaches its highest diversity (*Colias* and other genera are

also looked for). Some species form local races on almost every mountain

range. Up to 50 groups of Russian, European and American hunters enter the

area every summer despite occasional guerilla activity, economic chaos and

high crime levels.

 

Although local authorities are generally aware of ongoing poaching, there is

little they can do to stop it. Many rare subspecies are known only to people

who hunt or collect them - their habitats and habits are a tightly-kept

commercial secret. Getting to some locations requires hiring a helicopter,

which is a problem for cash-starving local governments. It is very difficult

to prevent smuggling of such small objects as tiny insects. Professional

poachers are tough people, excellent mountaineers, and they try to make

friends with local warlords and drug smugglers (which is usually the same).

 

We conducted a number of expeditions to Central Asia to gather information

about endangered butterflies and poaching. Finding them is an enormous

challenge. Some isolated populations number less than 100 insects and

inhabit less than 1 sq. km of rocks above snowline. Certain species fly only

for a few days once in two years, and the exact dates shift from year to

year. Sometimes gangs of poachers are secretly followed by others and then

shot. There is a lot of espionage, electronic bugging, and other James

Bond-style activities in this business. Once I even wrote a small movie

script about all this.

 

We conducted a number of expeditions to Central Asia to gather information

about endangered butterflies and poaching. Finding them is an enormous

challenge. Some isolated populations number less than 100 insects and

inhabit less than 1 sq. km of rocks above snowline. Certain species fly only

for a few days once in two years, and the exact dates shift from year to

year. Sometimes gangs of poachers are secretly followed by others and then

shot. There is a lot of espionage, electronic bugging, and other James

Bond-style activities in this business. Once I even wrote a small movie

script about all this.

 

Sometimes butterfly hunters cross the borders to smuggle rare insects from

Afghanistan or China. Although most of Central Asian countries try to

protect their species, in most cases they have no information about

newly-discovered populations. In the former Soviet republics, efforts of

local officials in charge of Nature protection are often limited to charging

fees and/or bribes for catching insects or taking them out of country.

 

Unlike Eastern Pamir, Western Pamir (Badakhshan) is a very difficult place

to travel. Its high ridges and deep gorges are sometimes almost

impenetrable. Each valley is inhabited by its own ethnic group, and has its

own unique climate and vegetation. Although poachers do visit the area,

local butterflies are less vulnerable, because their populations are usually

larger and more difficult to reach.

 

I am one of less than five people who have seen this butterfly, named after

my friend's wife. These creatures fly once in two years in a remote place in

Central Asia, where they inhabit a small rock face and an ajacent talus

slope. It takes five minutes to walk across their entire habitat. I hope no

one will see them within the next few decades, while butterfly collectors

still exist. We keep the location secret, of course. Although it is very

difficult to get there, the possible award is so high. If we let a word out,

this subspecies would likely become extinct in 3-5 years.

 

Few people have ever tried to study the ecology and life cycle of

high-altitude butterflies. Their larvae and pupae are mostly hidden under

stones, and can be extremely difficult to find. Raising adults from larvae

is almost impossible.

 

The most famous location in Central Asia is Sarez, the World's most

beautiful lake. It was formed in 1910, when an earthquake-caused rockslide

dammed Bartang River in Central Pamir. The lake eventually reached 70 km (40

miles) in length, and 1 km (.6 mile) in depth. All villages in the area were

either destroyed by the slide or inundated, so the entire country now

belongs to wildlife. Here one of the World's rarest butterflies, *Parnassius

autocrator*, lives on almost vertical slopes.

 

Getting to Sarez isn't easy. Doing it without a helicopter requires an

expedition so logistically complete, technically difficult and dangerous,

that no people have done it since the beginning of Civil War in Tajikistan.

If you manage to get a helicopter, you'd also need a pilot with many years

of Western Pamir experience. Bartang Gorge is the third deepest in the World

(after Kali Gandaki in Nepal and Colca in Peru). In some parts it is so

narrow that you can throw a stone across. There is always a possibility of

being killed by a missile from some of the villages along the route.

Finally, there are only three spots for landing near the lake, and they are

in the mouths of very windy canyons.

 

Despite all difficulties, butterfly hunters sometimes manage to reach the

lake. They catch butterflies on rock faces and moving talus slopes, and

casualties are an everyday routine in such expeditions. *Parnassius

autocrator, P. charltonius*, and also *P. loxias* from China/ Kyrgyzstan

border are each associated with stories of serious injuries and deaths.

 

Smaller species, like *P. simo*, which fly very high above snow line,

feeding on almost microscopic plants, do not require rock climbing, but

frostbites and acute altitude sickness are common among people looking for

them.

 

Local officials usually pay little attention to poachers, unless they see a

chance to charge somebody for something. To get from Kyrgyzstan to Pamir,

you have to pay fees at 32 checkpoints; most of these fees are openly

" unofficial " . Only in 1999 we finally got some Tajikistan officials to

arrest a group of butterfly poachers (the fact that they were also smuggling

opium helped a lot). In a shooting that accompanied the arrest, few people

were killed; others had to escape to higher elevation, where they froze to

death next night. 120 kg of opium and more than 3000 butterflies were

confiscated (an subsequently disappeared).

 

In 1997, I traveled to Nepal to study the situation there. By that time,

international butterfly trade became so widespread in Central Asia, that

even the most remote parts of the Himalaya and Tibet were regularly visited

by hunting expeditions. I tried to find out what areas were most heavily

exploited. One of the poachers' favorite hunting grounds was apparently Solo

Khumbu valley, including Sagarmatha National Park.

 

Most poachers, however, did not climb that high, preferring to catch

butterflies and moths in the Nature reserves around Katmandu, Pokhara and

along the road to Tibet. These last patches of remaining forests are

surrounded by agricultural lands and serve as the last refuges to small

populations of native species. Using light and chemical traps, hunters

managed to wipe out the most beautiful and rare insects. An average group of

butterfly hunters takes tens of thousands of specimens out of Nepal.

 

I warned the guards and supervisors of Nagarjun and Chitwan Nature Reserves

and members of Pokhara city administration about those illegal activities.

Later, our Fund sent official letters to the late King of Nepal and to

customs authorities, describing dangers of insect poaching and main channels

of smuggling. As a result, a large group of poachers was arrested in

Katmandu Airport a few months later.

 

Central and local administration in Nepal has often been described as

extremely slow and bureaucratic. Surprisingly, I found most officials to be

smart, effective, understanding and helpful. In the republics of the former

Soviet Central Asia, the situation is usually far worse. As regional clans

fight for administrative posts, most officials see their appointments as a

rare and brief opportunity to steal as much as possible, so they have little

or no time for anything else.

 

Central Asia is not the only area where the international insect trade is

destroying the local fauna. Among the most intensively exploited areas are

Southeast Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines, New Guinea, Tropical America,

and, in the last few years, China and South-Eastern Russia, particularly

Ussuriland. In Southeast Asia, Madagascar and Latin America, there are large

companies with hundreds of employees, selling insects to Europe, Japan and

USA. Although these people are usually not qualified enough to hunt rare

species, they kill hundreds of thousands of the most beautiful butterflies,

moths and beetles to sale them as souvenirs. The disappearance of large

insects is often followed by decline in some bird and bat species, as well

as by local extinctions of plants which depend on butterflies or beetles for

pollination. Other groups depend on insect larvae for food - moles, shrews,

and small opossums, for example, can become extinct if beetle larvae

disappear from the forest floor.

 

In Ussuriland, butterfly hunters look for rare species as well as for large

ones. Some species are already on the verge of extinction, others are

rapidly declining. Another problem here is the installation of bright lights

in remote villages, timber factories, gas stations and airfields. These

lights attract millions of insects, some of them rare and local. For many

years, a state-owned factory called " Nature and Education " killed thousands

of butterflies and moths outside Ussuri Nature Reserve. Mounted insects were

then sent to schools and regional museums. Just as the efforts of ecologists

resulted in its closure, the Perestroika started, and the factory was

privatized. For 10 more years, it kept killing insects, this time for

souvenir trade and for foreign collectors. Some species became rare or

disappeared in the area. In 1998, the joint campaign by our Fund and local

environmental groups finally forced regional authorities to close the

factory and confiscate its UV traps.

 

As large and beautiful butterflies are killed in hundreds of thousands to be

sold as souvenirs, small species do not attract much attention - they just

quietly die out because of habitat destruction, chemical and light

pollution.

 

The next major battlefield in the war on insect trade will be China.

Expeditions from Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Czech Republic and Japan have

already established smuggling routes in Tibet and Manchuria. Now they try to

establish new " hunting grounds " in Szechwan, Yunnan, Xinjian and other parts

of the country. Very few of them get caught: in 1999, a large Russian group

was arrested for smuggling 16 kg of rare butterflies from the country. They

were all released after paying a fine (equal to the market price of

one *Parnassius

hardwickii* from Tibet). As the country gradually becomes more open for

tourists, there is little doubt that even the most inaccessible places, such

as Kuen Lun mountains, will soon be regularly exploited by " entomological "

expeditions.

 

South America is home to some of the World's most beautiful butterflies,

such as *Morphidae* and many of *Papilionidae* species. The continent had

been heavily exploited by butterfly-hunting expeditions in the early 20th

century, but the situation here has considerably improved in the 1950-s and

60-s. Unfortunately, now it is rapidly getting worse. Catching butterflies

for souvenir trade is an important source of income for young people in some

villages. In many places around Iquitos, Peru, school-age children make more

money than their hard-working parents, simply by catching thousands of

butterflies and other large insects and selling them to insect dealers.

 

People in many parts of Latin America are so poor, and reproduce so fast,

that they'll inevitably destroy any remaining flora and fauna in populated

areas. It is probably too late to try to save biodiversity outside national

parks and other preserves. But the situation in many parks is not much

better, particularly for insects. More often than not, park administration

doesn't consider invertebrates worth protecting, so collecting parties can

operate freely inside the protected area.

 

Even if park guards know that all parts of the ecosystem must be protected,

they are too busy trying to control illegal hunting, logging, coca planting

and forest burning. Parque Nacional Manu is one of the best-protected

Natural areas in Latin America. Still, in 1995 it was not unusual to see

large groups of people of all ages, patrolling forest roads in the foothills

in search of *Morpho* and other large butterflies. At night, they collected

hundreds of moths with UV lights and chemical baits.

 

It was very easy for me to explain the importance of insect conservation to

park stuff, but it took them three years to stop such activities in the

park. Almost everywhere outside Manu, butterfly business is growing rapidly.

It doesn't attract as much attention as fur or pet trade. So, few people

realize that having a box of stuffed butterflies in your room is not better

than wearing an ocelot fur coat, or keeping and endangered parrot as pet.

 

The main problem in fighting international insect trade is lack of

information. Even people responsible for the enforcement of environmental

laws often pay little attention to insects smuggled out or in their

countries. Insect collectors never tell their secrets, and professional

entomologists are more interested in agriculture pests and other

economically important species than in rare ones. If the situation will not

change within the next decade, hundreds of insects will be hunted to

extinction, mostly without even being noticed by scientists. As long as open

trade in insects and seashells is allowed in USA and Europe, the mass

extinction of these groups will continue, fed by our ignorance and greed.

 

Insect dealers feel so confident that they often sell rare and endangered

species online. Web search by a scientific name like *Morpho* or *Parnassius

* would yield 2-3 sites with large parties of specimens for sale. It is not

unusual to see offers like " discounts on 1000+ series " , even for the most

vulnerable species. Most of these sites are based in Eastern Europe, but

some gangs have branches in USA and Western Europe. Every time I see a new

site of this kind, I try to inform Russian office of WWF, or other

authorities, but new sites seem to appear much faster than old ones are

closed. So far, I've succeeded only in two cases, and, except for one group

arrested in China (see above), no online insect dealer has had any serious

trouble.

 

My trip to the Philippines, once a major center of biodiversity, was

particularly depressing. This small country has turned into one huge human

settlement, and the remaining islands of natural habitat (usually the size

of an urban park) are separated by many miles of merged-together towns,

villages, fields, and badly polluted seas. Park guards in many Nature

preserves were surprisingly well-informed about the problems of illegal

insect collecting, but they were unable to effectively protect even large

animals and trees from poaching. Some islands have already lost their

forests completely, so that thousands of endemic species have gone extinct

before even being described. On the island of Mindoro, the last remaining

patch of lowland rainforest is located inside a huge penal colony, and one

of the best-paying jobs of the inmates is catching butterflies and moths for

sale. All the rarest species have been hunted to extinction already, so now

they collect huge numbers of more common ones, to sell as souvenirs.

 

It looks like the majority of the world's butterfly and moth species will go

extinct within the next few decades. They will be followed by an uncountable

number of plants and animals that depend on them for food or pollination.

What it will be like, can be seen on Hawaiian Islands, where the entire

native ecosystem is falling apart, and most of local flora and fauna is

being replaced by introduced species. The olulu plant was probably

pollinated by a hawk moth, but this moth became extinct before even been

discovered. Now all remaining olulus depend on hand pollination by park

rangers. Most other plant species are not so lucky and don't have rangers at

hand, so they simply disappear from the face of Earth if their pollinators

are gone. Each plant species that dies out is followed by numerous

invertebrate species depending on it, and so on.

 

2001 update: In July 2001, two Russian butterfly hunters were arrested in a

National park in Sikkim, India. I was involved in this case as the only

independent expert, while the international insect mafia (represented by

some professional entomologists from Germany and Russia) and Russian

consulate tried to get the poachers out of jail. Thanks to local

environmentalits, these two " scientists " had to spend few weeks under

arrest, although they eventually got away with the crime after paying a

symbolic fine. The English translation of an article I wrote for Arguments

and Facts, Russia's most popular weekly newspaper, is here.

 

2002 update: Bernhard Wenczel, a Swiss entomologist, is breeding rare

species of Saturnidae moths and other insects. He also tries to develop a

sustainable model of insect collecting in Peru by teaching local butterfly

hunters how to minimize bycatch and breed the species most wanted by

collectors. His goal is to make forest conservation economically attractive

for local people by providing a source of income which depends on preserving

forest rather than destroying it.

 

Unfortunately, people like Bernhard Wenczel are still a tiny minority. Most

dealers are more interested in destruction rather than conservation, and

even better-protected areas in Europe and North America are in danger. As

Bernhard himself told me:

" In 1986 in the Verzasca Valley of Ticino State, I saw some kids hunting a

recently described endemic subspecies of *Parnassius phoebus*. They didn't

collect the butterflies, just killed and threw away. I asked them about it.

They didn't know why they were doing it, but said that they'd been paid by

some Japanese guy to kill as many butterflies as they could. I never saw

him, but I informed the local police... " Apparently, some commercial dealer

tried to drive the subspecies to extinction just to beat up prices.

 

Tropical countries paying enough attention to protecting biodiversity are

even more rare than honest insect dealers. In striking contrast with most

other nations of Southeastern Asia, Malaysia managed to preserve large

tracts of forests, and is doing its best to protect its wonderful Nature

reserves. Even the most beautiful butterflies and moths are still common

there.

 

Large beetles, scorpions, and moths are becoming increasingly rare in most

tropical areas, as thousands are collected for souvenir trade. Beyond doubt,

some illegal collectors manage to enter Malaysia's Nature reserves, but

their impact there is not yet so obvious as elsewhere.

 

2003 update: In Mexico and Central America, overcollecting seems to be a

minor threat compared to habitat destruction. Forests outside protected

reserves are mostly gone; even National parks do not offer much of

protection in most countries in the region.

 

n Mexico and Guatemala, cloud forests seem to be even more threatened than

lowland rainforests. I ended up bying a tiny patch of cloud forest in a

desperate attempt to save its inhabitants from extinction - details here.

 

 

 

 

--

United against elephant polo

http://www.stopelephantpolo.com

http://www.freewebs.com/azamsiddiqui