Part 4: Corruption in marine wildlife trafficking

Quantifying the illegal trade in marine species as a whole is challenging, yet it is known to occur globally and to be expanding as demand increases. Harvest levels are unsustainable. To take just a few examples:

• The ornamental fish trade is estimated to involve at least 150 million fish and 1.5 million coral colonies per year. Many are caught illegally to meet demand in the growing aquarium trade.
• Fleets of up to 200 Chinese vessels have been accused of poaching coral populations off the coast of Japan, destroying entire ecosystems.
• The over-exploitation of giant clams in Chinese waters has forced traffickers to harvest further afield in the Spratly Islands and beyond.
• Large quantities of CITES-protected marine turtles appear to be trafficked to China. A 2014 seizure in Vietnam involved more than 10 tons of hawksbill turtles, approximately 7,000 individual turtles.
• Seizures of seahorses and other small marine species can easily reach into the millions of animals, especially when their weight is reduced through drying. For example, one 3 kg seizure catalogued by marine conservation group Project Seahorse contained 1,000 seahorses. In another instance, an air traveller was caught with 20,000 seahorses in his luggage. Peruvian authorities seized 8 million seahorses from Chinese-flagged ships in 2016 in a single operation, and another 12.8 million in 2019.
• Most Romanian caviar labelled for export as farmed – more than 70 percent – is actually illegally harvested and processed for export. The result? Large-scale poaching is driving Beluga sturgeon to extinction.
• At least a hundred tonnes of CITES-protected European eels were estimated in 2018 to be trafficked each year.