That croc export quota is filled every year, Jody, and if you add up the numbers that are reported as being imported into the US, Europe and Japan alone, they are more than the total worldwide export quota in most years. It's a fair number of animals.

We are talking apples and oranges about (re)introductions. My point is that the introductions that 'take', for example in south Florida, are almost (or all) "garbage animals", things that are dirt common where they are native, probably because they are highly adaptable and breed fast. Those are not the species that become endangered -- instead, it's the things that have very specialized requirements that tend to be affected first by environmental degradation, and those are the species you'll need to be able to breed in captivity and successfully reintroduce. That's a heap harder. The same reasons that make them susceptible to extinction in nature make them tough to keep in captivity, and there's no point in reintroducing them anyway, if you haven't reversed whatever the environmental factors were that led to them becoming rare in the first place.

Sure, there are lots of iguanas and Niles in Florida, but how many V. prasinus colonies do you know about?

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