Legal or unenforceable? Violations of trade regulations and the case of the Philippine Sailfin Lizard Hydrosaurus pustulatus (Reptilia: Squamata: Agamidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Philippine Sailfin Lizard (Agamidae: Hydrosaurus pustulatus) is a nationally protected Philippine endemic species. It is threatened by habitat destruction, pollution and overexploitation for the domestic pet trade, yet less is known about the international component of the trade. Here we investigate the international trade in Hydrosaurus spp. (H. weberi, H. amboinensis, and H. pustulatus) with an emphasis on H. pustulatus. We analysed international seizures combined with international online sales and trade data for the United States of America (USA). The export of H. pustulatus from the Philippines has been prohibited since 1991, except under special circumstances, yet they continue to be traded internationally, and we found evidence for trade in Asia, Europe, and North America. Most of these animals, however, were declared to be captive-bred. While imports to and exports from the US consisted mostly of other species of Hydrosaurus, H. pustulatus was by far the most coveted species online, with prices significantly higher for H. pustulatus than any of the other species. While not many seizures have occurred outside the Philippines, even wild-caught individuals were found to be ‘legally’ imported to the USA – in apparent violation of the Lacey Act. We recommend H. pustulatus to be listed in CITES Appendix III, in order for countries other than the USA to have a legal basis to seize wild-caught animals trafficked from the Philippines and to monitor trade in captive-bred specimens. Further, we suggest the use of automated cross-referencing between imported species and the national protection status of the species’ native range states to ensure that legislation violations are detected at the point of import.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".