• Posted 12/19/2024.
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    I am still waiting on my developer to finish up on the Classifieds Control Panel so I can use it to encourage members into becoming paying members. Google Adsense has become a real burden on the viewing of this site, but honestly it is the ONLY source of income now that keeps it afloat. I tried offering disabling the ads being viewed by paying members, but apparently that is not enough incentive. Quite frankly, Google Adsense has dropped down to where it barely brings in enough daily to match even a single paid member per day. But it still gets the bills paid. But at what cost?

    So even without the classifieds control panel being complete, I believe I am going to have to disable those Google ads completely and likely disable some options here that have been free since going to the new platform. Like classified ad bumping, member name changes, and anything else I can use to encourage this site to be supported by the members instead of the Google Adsense ads.

    But there is risk involved. I will not pay out of pocket for very long during this last ditch experimental effort. If I find that the membership does not want to support this site with memberships, then I cannot support your being able to post your classified ads here for free. No, I am not intending to start charging for your posting ads here. I will just shut the site down and that will be it. I will be done with FaunaClassifieds. I certainly don't need this, and can live the rest of my life just fine without it. If I see that no one else really wants it to survive neither, then so be it. It goes away and you all can just go elsewhere to advertise your animals and merchandise.

    Not sure when this will take place, and I don't intend to give any further warning concerning the disabling of the Google Adsense. Just as there probably won't be any warning if I decide to close down this site. You will just come here and there will be some sort of message that the site is gone, and you have a nice day.

    I have been trying to make a go of this site for a very long time. And quite frankly, I am just tired of trying. I had hoped that enough people would be willing to help me help you all have a free outlet to offer your stuff for sale. But every year I see less and less people coming to this site, much less supporting it financially. That is fine. I tried. I retired the SerpenCo business about 14 years ago, so retiring out of this business completely is not that big if a step for me, nor will it be especially painful to do. When I was in Thailand, I did not check in here for three weeks. I didn't miss it even a little bit. So if you all want it to remain, it will be in your hands. I really don't care either way.

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    Some people have indicated that finding the method to contribute is rather difficult. And I have to admit, that it is not all that obvious. So to help, here is a thread to help as a quide. How to become a contributing member of FaunaClassifieds.

    And for the record, I will be shutting down the Google Adsense ads on January 1, 2025.
  • Responding to email notices you receive.
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    In short, DON'T! Email notices are to ONLY alert you of a reply to your private message or your ad on this site. Replying to the email just wastes your time as it goes NOWHERE, and probably pisses off the person you thought you replied to when they think you just ignored them. So instead of complaining to me about your messages not being replied to from this site via email, please READ that email notice that plainly states what you need to do in order to reply to who you are trying to converse with.

Dendrobates tinctorius "Tumucumaque"/"Peacock"

S

Socratic Monologue

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There continue to be sales of Dendrobates tinctorius "Tumucumaque" that are frequently accompanied by claims that they were legally imported into the US. So far to my knowledge, no one who has claimed that these frogs were legally imported into the US has been able to back that claim up with documentation.

All captive specimens of the morph were relatively recently smuggled out of nationally protected areas in Brazil or descended from those trafficked animals. Note that some websites (the largest in the general herp classified category, and the largest Dendrobatid forum) do not allow sales of this or some other animals that are 100% certain to be descended from trafficked stock.

Here's a nice write up on the morph by a Dart Den staff member that explains the issues and timeline of how this trafficked morph came to be in the US hobby. Its purpose is to give information "so you are better informed before making a purchase", a goal that is sadly not as common with sellers as one might hope:

https://www.oneillscrossing.com/202...ctorius-tumucumaque-smuggled-frog-do-not-buy/
 
I don't care to get into the back and forth of the current legal standing of this locale in US herpetoculture, but wanted to comment on this statement from the cited website: "If a given zoo receives illegally imported and/or confiscated CITES-listed specimens, then offspring from those specimens would not be legal to distribute within that country and could not be legally exported to other countries."

There is a precedent that's been set in enforcement of CITES and the Lacey Act that refutes the above statement from within the orchid hobby. Paphiopedilum species within Section Parvisepalum occur primarily in Vietnam and China, often along the border of these countries. For years, there was speculation that the Chinese "populations" were actually plants that were transplanted from Vietnam, which does not allow exports, to China, which does/did.

Upon discovery of two Vietnamese species, Paph. vietnamense and Paph. hangianum, there was a huge demand from growers because they were large-flowered and "new". Imports of these plants came into the U.S. and led to subsequent confiscation(all Paphs. are CITES I, which should have restricted import unless they were imported as sterile flasks). These confiscated plants were given to select nurseries deemed "rescue centers", and all progeny, hybrid or species, from plants that slipped through the cracks and did not get confiscated were considered illegal. Enforcement was so strong that the American Orchid Society even banned them from being shown and awarded for plant/flower quality.

However, the rescue centers were allowed to propagate these plants in vitro and progeny from these (with paperwork) were considered perfectly legal and were allowed to be sold freely and shown at AOS events, creating a monopoly for these rescue centers even though the species is CITES I and Vietnam has never allowed export. Fast forward to today and these species are relatively available in the U.S. market as both pure species and as parents of hybrids, and there is little to no concern of legality because the rescue centers were allowed to "wash" the original imports. Similar stories also exist for species such as Phrag. kovachii out of Peru.

So, with all that said, if the stories of a confiscation event and specimens given to an institution, which later released them back into the hobby are true, the above examples set a precedent for the offsprings' legality.
 
One basic and important difference in the two cases is that a zoo is not the same as a USFWS Plant Rescue Center. The latter are part of an official and fairly high profile USFWS program.

Just to clarify (not to you, Spaff, but generally), the statement

"If a given zoo receives illegally imported and/or confiscated CITES-listed specimens, then offspring from those specimens would not be legal to distribute within that country and could not be legally exported to other countries."

is claimed by a trustworthy source to come directly from USFWS. I read it as a statement of policy, but not as one that was subject to no exceptions whatsoever.

As I understand the P. vietnamense case, an official exception was made for that species by USFWS. According to the US Botanic Garden,

"In an effort to cool the demand for wild-collected specimens from decimated native populations of Paphiopedilum vietnamense, the U.S. Botanic Garden has collaborated with a commercial orchid grower and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to bring this orchid into legal cultivation."

As for P. kovachii, Peru routinely issues CITES export permits since 2009. That species was described in 2002, and in 2004 Kovach and Selby were found guilty of trafficking it.

In 2007, the AOS published this:

"There is a reason we made the hybrids we did — the five plants collected that day of our adventure are still considered the property of the Peruvian government. The plants are not allowed to be sold or to leave Peru, including artificially propagated divisions. All of the breeding must be approved by the Peruvian government and the only hybrids we could make were created with plants presently growing in Peru from Manrique’s personal collection of phragmipediums, so we were limited to what was available. It was also illegal to take pollen out of the country, because it would require CITES permits, which the government would not approve."

That strongly implies that as of 2007 no legal specimens existed outside of Peru, and in 2009 legal ones became available. It looks like there's not really room in the timeline for a permitted USFWS release of confiscated plants.

Since Tom Mirenda takes as his example the vietnamense case in a 2007 paper (well worth a read for the overlap with herp concerns) but says nothing about kovachii, I presume not only that the latter species isn't relevant to this discussion and that the former is an exceptional case. I don't know that I'd call such a distinct and isolated case a 'precedent'.
 
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