Canada’s role in the international trade in live monitor lizards: An examination of CITES trade data with notes on illegal trade
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Monitor lizards (Varanus spp.) are heavily traded internationally to supply demand for their skins, meat,parts used in medicines, and as pets. We analyzed ten years (2011–2021) of CITES trade data and additional documentationto understand Canada’s role as an importer of live monitor lizards for the pet trade. Challenges with analysis arosedue to substantial gaps in Canada’s reporting. These gaps highlight critical deficiencies in Canada’s CITES records andpose challenges for identifying the true number of monitor lizards imported to Canada. Despite these limitations, therecords list more than 14,000 monitor lizards imported commercially to Canada during that timeframe. Some speciesimported to and exported from Canada are protected in their countries of origin (over and above international CITESlistings), which makes their appearance in international trade questionable. Dedicating more resources to implementingCanada’s prohibitions on the import of animals taken in contravention of foreign state laws could strengthen Canada’sresponse to illegal trade. Ensuring accurate recording of the number of animals that are actually imported into Canadaalso would provide a more precise account of the total trade volume. Improving record keeping and timely reportingis fundamental to Canada meeting its reporting obligations under CITES.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".