THE AUSTRALIAN (Sydney) 30 August 06 Poachers prey on research publications - Scientific literature is revealing the locations of newly discovered animals (Lila Guterman)
The gecko could have sprung from the mind of Dr Seuss: It had black spots. It had white spots. It had stripes on those spots. The 23cm lizard with bright orange eyes was new to science in the late 1990s, when L. Lee Grismer, a professor of biology at La Sierra University in Riverside, California, first encountered it.
But now, doing nothing more than research, he may have indirectly wiped out the gecko species from its home range in southern China.
Grismer simply described the lizard in a scientific journal, the Journal of Herpetology. He named it Goniurosaurus luii and recalls thinking, "If we're going to protect these animals, we need to describe them and get them on the books." To his dismay, "Within months of the description, these things hit the pet trade with a bang," he says. "These things were going for $US1500 apiece."
Grismer has not returned to the site but other scientists have. "They say when you go to this place in southern China, it looks like a bomb hit it," he says. "The rocks are overturned, they're smashed, you don't have geckos anywhere."
Although poaching exotic animals is not new, Grismer says smugglers have become cleverer, using scientists' research papers to find newly described animals.
He is not alone in that concern. Three other scientists joined him in a letter to the journal Science in May, telling the glum stories of three new species, all quickly pillaged by poachers after the species' scientific description appeared in print. The letter warns fellow taxonomists that their activities may harm the animals they intend to study or to conserve.
The problem may not yet be widespread for new animal species but the researchers urge their colleagues to debate solutions before it grows in scope. The issue is even forcing biologists to consider withholding information from publication, a solution that is anathema to some researchers.
"Science is a free flow of information," Grismer says. "I'll be damned if I'm going to have these criminals dictate how I'm going to do my science."
The wildlife trade is a multibillion-dollar industry, but it seems to have branched into newly discovered animals only recently.
Botanists, by contrast, have faced the problem for longer. "That's the unfortunate thing of discovering and publishing a new species; it obviously brings with it the need for collectors to have one," says Geoff Bailey, a scientific consultant in Manchester, England, who studies cactuses as a hobby.
When scientists discover a new animal or plant, they normally collect one or more - legally, they point out, often going through a lengthy permit process - to deposit in an institutional collection. That animal or plant becomes the type specimen, the representative of its species.
As hobbyists or poachers hunt for plants, says Michael Chamberland, collections manager of the herbarium at the US National Arboretum, the area where the type specimen was found often becomes the "sacrificial locality". "One has to hope that there are satellite locations elsewhere and that those are not going to be revealed as widely," hesays.
Some botanists have concluded that to preserve species of commercial interest - such as orchids, cactuses and carnivorous plants - they should publish only general geographical information rather than precise locations. For example, when the Wollemi pine was discovered in 1994 in a national park near Sydney, scientists kept its location secret. Just a few dozen of the trees live in the wild, and before their discovery the species was known only from fossils millions of years old. The state Government restricts visits to the site and some scientists were even brought there blindfolded.
Researchers rarely go to such extremes. But botanists often play it coy in their publications. "Nowadays people are very guarded as to giving location other than a very generalised statement," Bailey says.
Other researchers object to withholding information. W. John Kress, a research scientist and chairman of the department of botany at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in the US, points out that habitat loss threatens far more plant species than does poaching. "One hundred years down the line, when these habitats are destroyed anyway, having the records of where these things were scientifically will be very important," he says.
The animal scientists who wrote to Science concur. "I believe very strongly that the conservation benefits far outweigh the potential detriment," says Bryan L. Stuart, lead author of the letter, who defended his PhD thesis last month at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He described a new salamander that quickly appeared in the exotic pet trade. In most countries, legislation to protect a rare species requires that it have a scientific name and that the government know where the species occurs. What's more, scientists studying the species need to know where it lives (or lived) to determine how it evolved and adapted, among other things.
Rogerio Bertani, a tarantula expert at the Butantan Institute, a biology and biomedicine organisation in Sao Paolo, Brazil, agrees, even though Brazilian officials once caught smugglers with copies of his papers.
Grismer imagines taking matters into his own hands. "I fantasise that just one time I'm going to find one of these guys" taking a rare animal, he says, "and I'm going to make an example of him. I may end up in jail, but it would be worth it." Of course, he realises that violence will not solve the wildlife-smuggling problem and neither will policing the areas, which costs too much for even the US to eliminate poaching from its national parks.
"The best thing I can come up with is an imperfect solution," Stuart says. He recommends that taxonomists delay publishing their finds until they have worked with the government of the country where the animal is found to develop laws to protect it.
Once researchers describe a species, the information often goes into online databases, which provide an even bigger security risk. Finding articles in obscure research journals takes some hunting by poachers, but anyone with an internet connection can check the online archives at many institutions, finding the origins of the plants and animal species in their collections.
Scientists treasure that kind of easy access. For instance, combining data from an entire region with past records of plant ranges should help scientists predict how climate change could affect plant populations, says Zack E. Murrell, an associate professor of biology at Appalachian State University in the US and director of a database organisation called the Southeast Regional Network of Expertise and Collections.
But curators of herbaria are debating how much data to reveal online. "It's very ad hoc," says Richard L. Pyle, an associate zoologist in ichthyology and the database co-ordinator for natural sciences at the Bishop Museum, a museum of natural and cultural history in Honolulu. "Every scientist and institution makes up their own approaches as they go."
For animals and plants, says Kress, of the Smithsonian, "99 per cent of the common stuff has already been found, so it is going to be things that are inherently endangered and rare that are discovered and described now".
And unfortunately, that very rarity can drive the exotic pet or plant trade. "It's like rare art collectors," Stuart says. "The rarer a piece is, the more desirable it is."
Poachers prey on research publications

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