Videos that were shared widely, showed the critically endangered apes, each around a year old, with limited mobility, huddled together, chomping on bananas from a container. And then more videos emerged of the group being bottle-fed in a Bhubaneswar Zoo where they are now being monitored. Some 2,000 km away from their natural habitat in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra, five listless baby orangutans were found, bafflingly, in a forest in the middle of Odisha on Tuesday.
Today, the socioeconomic link to poverty has vanished and has been replaced by human population size as the sole significant driver, cementing the role of urban centres as the nexus of demand, the paper added. “For many commonly traded species, confiscations occurred hundreds of kilometers from their native habitats, frequently in major cities like Mexico City. As for India, primates, turtles and lizards are the most smuggled illegal species into the country, Dr. The species smuggled out of India are largely turtles, parakeets and golden langurs. The smuggling occurs primarily through land routes between India and Myanmar, he added.
No less than half of Mexico’s native parrot species are directly threatened by trapping for the illegal wildlife trade, said the researchers, “elevating their risk of extinction”. They found that poachers consistently targeted “charismatic,” and high-value species, particularly macaws and Amazon parrots, at unsustainable rates. Jose told The Hindu. “The criminal network is amoebic in nature: it configures and re-configures to safeguard the business,” he said.
By integrating criminological theory with landscape-scale network modelling, scientists deconstructed the illicit trade network, making it more visible and predictable. Now, a new study that integrates 30 years of confiscation data, criminological modelling, and spatial network analysis, unravels the critical trade routes of another much-trafficked species, Mexico’s parrots, from biodiverse habitats to urban centres around the world, which may provide clues to the criminal networks in other parts of the world.
What they gathered was “a shift toward a more organized trade catering to specific consumer preferences in growing urban areas.”
