Sea Horse Smuggling Is a Big Problem, Despite Global Efforts to Protect These Beloved Aquatic Creatures
Between 2010 and 2021, authorities seized around five million individual sea horses worth more than $21 million
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/SarahKuta.png)
Traffickers are illegally smuggling huge numbers of sea horses around the world, despite global regulations aimed at protecting the oddly shaped aquatic creatures.
Between 2010 and 2021, authorities seized around five million individual sea horses worth more than $21 million, according to a new study published this week in the journal Conservation Biology. And those figures are likely an underestimate of the problem.
“The seizures we analyzed were based only on records we could find,” says lead author Sarah Foster, an oceans and fisheries researcher with the University of British Columbia’s Project Sea Horse initiative, in a statement. “Yet even this limited window reveals a global problem, showing that the true scale of illegal sea horse trade is likely much larger.”
For the study, scientists compiled 297 seizure records from 192 online records, including news stories and government notices, between January 2010 and April 2021. They scanned the reports for details like the number of sea horses, the value of the items, the size of the shipments, the number of people involved and the trade routes.
The data offers new insights into the scope, scale and spread of the illegal sea horse trade. For example, trade routes seem to be diversifying. Though China and Hong Kong have long been major destinations for sea horses, the study finds that authorities in Europe and Latin America are also intercepting illegal shipments of the animals. In total, 62 jurisdictions were implicated in the seizure records.
“One of the most interesting seizures that we uncovered was in Vietnam, coming from Peru,” Foster tells the Vancouver Sun’s Tiffany Crawford. “But when the Vietnamese authorities did [a] species ID on the sea horses, it turned out they were a West African sea horse species. So these sea horses had gone through West Africa, Peru, Latin America and then on their way to Asia.”
In addition, traffickers were often found to be smuggling sea horses alongside other products, like pangolin scales and elephant ivory. Most seizures occurred while the shipments were in transit or once they’d reached the destination country. Passenger luggage at airports accounted for the highest number of seizures, while shipments found in sea cargo were the largest by volume.
Most illegal caches were intercepted by customs enforcement agencies, followed by the police. But just 7 percent of records included information about legal penalties, so it’s largely unclear what happens after traffickers get caught.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/1a/d5/1ad5f305-7283-4ab0-8095-2ba3748ed762/7_hippocampus_trimaculatus__caron_wong___guylian_seahorse_of_the_world.jpg)
Sea horses are traded to aquariums and sold as souvenirs. But, more commonly, they are used in traditional Chinese medicine. Practitioners often make dried sea horses into a tea, which they use to treat conditions ranging from male sexual dysfunction to asthma.
The researchers say they are not questioning the validity of these uses but, rather, want to ensure the sea horse trade is sustainable moving forward, per the Vancouver Sun.
“We’ve done work with traditional medicine traders in Hong Kong, and when we ask them, ‘How long do you want sea horses around?’ they say, ‘Forever, they’re really important.’ And we agree,” says Foster in a statement.
Sea horses were the first genus of marine fishes listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a global agreement to ensure the trade of wild plants and animals is “legal, traceable and biologically sustainable,” according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The United States is one of the 184 countries, plus the European Union, that have signed the treaty.
This agreement does allow sea horses to be traded legally, provided that traders obtain the proper permits and can prove their actions are not detrimental to the creatures’ survival in the wild. But this often proves challenging, because many species of sea horses are threatened or endangered. So, instead, traders work on the black market.
To stop this illegal activity, the researchers are calling for increased enforcement in the countries where the shipments originate and harsher penalties on smugglers. At the same time, world leaders need to make “sustainable, legal trade viable enough that people obey the laws,” Foster says in the statement.
Additional research into the illegal sea horse trade may also help solve the problem by further illuminating trade routes, patterns and gaps in enforcement, according to the researchers.
“By harnessing this information and prioritizing the protection of all marine species, progress can be made toward a sustainable future in which [Illegal wildlife trade] is eradicated, and marine ecosystems thrive,” they write in the paper.
