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THE PLANET’S most ancient fish, its largest land mammal, and a flying
‘fox’ will share the spotlight next week in Switzerland as conservationists
meet to assess the fate of endangered species. The signatories to the Convention
on International Trade in Endangered Species in Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)
– which sets the regulations that aim to save threatened species – meet
between 9 and 20 October in Lausanne to reassess their lists. This year’s
meeting could prove to be the most heavily attended and controversial ever.

The biggest bone of contention will be the African elephant. Tanzania
and Kenya, with backing from Western conservation groups, want to put the
elephant on Appendix 1 of the convention (see ‘Elephants and the ivory tower,
¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ, 26 August). If approved, the proposal would place Loxodonta
africana among animals and plants threatened with extinction. Trade in ivory,
now allowed under the conditions set down in Appendix 2 of CITES, would
end. The new listing would also put a stop, say the proposal’s backers,
to the illegal trade that flourishes alongside the legitimate ivory business
.

But Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa oppose the listing. They have
large, growing herds of elephants, the result of strict controls on hunting,
they argue. Ivory from these herds generates much-needed income, and these
countries want to maintain some kind of legal trade, perhaps through a central
auction house. Their backers, including several wildlife specialists in
Africa, say that the elephant’s monetary value to people who share its habitat
is the only thing that can save it.

The ivory cartel has also sparked some disagreement within CITES over
the way the secretariat raises money. The convention encourages the secretariat
to raise donations from the businesses that profit from legal trade in wildlife.
But some want to draw the line with ivory traders – except, apparently,
Eugene Lapointe, secretary general of CITES. In a letter dated 17 August,
Lapointe asked the Ivory Division of the Japan General Merchandise Importers
Association to help to raise $100 000 to bring delegates to the meeting
in Lausanne.

The standing committee of CITES, consisting of member nations, is considering
ways to ensure that the secretariat is not improperly influenced by donors.
‘There should be all clearer disclosure of where the secretariat’s money
comes from and where it is spent,’ says Marshall Jones of the US Fish and
Wildlife Service. The US currently chairs the standing committee.

While the elephant looms largest on the meeting’s agenda, it is not
the most extraordinary creature under consideration. Consider the coelacanth.
The coelacanth, Latimeria chalumnae, is as rare a fish as can be found.
Fossils of the fish discovered over the past century place its extinction
at about 70 million years ago, roughly the same time the dinosaurs disappeared.
In 1938, however, a fisherman casting deep nets in the waters off eastern
South Africa pulled up a single, bizarre blue fish. It died shortly after
being landed, but the fisherman took it ashore to find out what it was.

Biologists were amazed by the specimen, which they identified as a crossopterygian.
Fossils of this subclass of fishes appear as far back as the Devonian, 400
million years ago. Scientific journals hummed with excitement when the fish
was determined to be a coelacanth; one writer likened the discovery to meeting
a live dinosaur on a weekend walk.

Fourteen years passed before another fisherman brought up a coelacanth.
Like all the fish caught since then, roughly 200 of them, the ‘fossil fish’
was found near the Comoro archipelago between Madagascar and southeastern
Africa. It lives for the most part on the ocean floor at a depth of about
300 to 400 metres. Its ideal water temperature hovers between 15 and 17
Degree C. Although it rises as much as 200 metres to feed, it cannot tolerate
a new environment for long. No fish has lived for more than 20 hours at
the surface. Most specimens have been preserved and placed in museums, although
the largest catch, 183 centimetres long, hangs stuffed in the home of the
president of the Comoro Islands.

Why would a fish so hard to find need protection under CITES? Hans Fricke,
a scientist and film-maker at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Physiology
in Seewiesen, West Germany, says the coelacanth is growing too popular.
As food, it is worthless, its oily flesh considered unpalatable. But its
value to scientists has raised its official price to $150. It can be sold
legally only to the Comoran government. Within the past two years, however,
a black market has arisen where the price for a single fish can reach $2000.
That is a small fortune in the Comoros, where the average income is less
than $100 a year.

This year at CITES, West Germany will propose putting the coelacanth
on Appendix 1. According to Fricke and his colleagues Eugene Balon of the
University of Guelph in Canada and Michael Bruton at the Smith Institute
of Ichthyology in South Africa, only two to four fish were caught each year
until 1987, when 12 fish were reported taken. ‘Ironically,’ the scientists
observe in a recent article in the journal Environmental Biology of Fishes,
‘it is the very institutions that most appreciate the value and importance
of the coelacanth – museums, universities and research institutes – which
may now threaten its survival, although there is also an increasing private
³Ù°ù²¹»å±ð.’

The private trade, the scientists believe, stems from Japan. They report
that demand is growing in the Far East, ‘where it is rumoured that the notochord
(akin to a spinal column) fluid promotes longevity’. They claim that a Japanese
medical technical college recently organised four expeditions to the Comoros
to buy coelacanths for medical research. TRAFFIC, an organisation that monitors
trade in animals, reports that a dead coelacanth was recently seized on
its way into Japan by customs agents there.

More ominous, says Balon, is a report from South Africa that Mitsubishi
has sent an expedition to capture coelacanths. In a letter last month to
Balon, Bruton reports ‘reliable information’ indicating that Mitsubishi
had arranged to charter a ship, Pacific Oak, out of Cape Town, to sail to
the Comoros to catch three live coelacanths. The expedition, reportedly
budgeted with $1.5 million, is being filmed for television, and any coelacanths
caught live are to be flown to the Kimbo Aquariam in Japan. Wrote Bruton:
‘Rationale is that they want to breed coelacanths in aquaria for research
purposes. I suggest that we object strongly through the media, radio and
°Õ³Õ.’

One reason for opposing capture, says Balon, beyond the fact that they
have never survived capture, is that the fish take about 22 years to mature
to reproductive age. They have large eggs and bear only about five embryos
at a time, which are born live after a 13-month gestation. ‘Even if there
are 2000 of them down there, they would be gone in no time,’ says Balon,
if people start trying to capture them.

‘None should be brought up,’ argues Balon, who has spent years studying
the fish. ‘All the scientists agree,’ including Japanese marine biologists,
he says. ‘Until we know more about the coelacanth by observing it from submersibles,
we cannot risk it.’

On the other side of the world, it is the cuisine of several cultures
in the western Pacific, and especially in Guam, that is threatening another
species – the flying fox.

The US and Sweden have proposed putting a total of eight species of
the genus Pteropus, also known as the fruit bat, onto Appendix 1. The flying
fox is endemic to the islands of the western Pacific, Australia, and parts
of Southeast Asia.

Apparently the fruit bat makes good eating. Pacific Islanders cook them
in pots with coconut milk, spices and fruit (the fruit having nothing to
do with the name of the animal, which describes the animal’s diet). The
bat, whose wingspan can reach more than a metre, is especially popular on
Guam, where the species has been eaten almost out of existence. According
to Amy Brautigam, of the Center for Marine Conservation on the island, residents
of Guam are relatively wealthy compared with other Pacific islanders and
can afford to pay $20 a piece for the bats.

Demand is driving several species to extinction, according to the Fish
and Wildlife Service of the US government. Roosts of more than 100 000 bats
were common in the 1920s, and ‘camps’ of up to 30 million animals at a single
site were reported in the 1930s in Australia. On some Pacific islands, populations
are down to a few hundred individuals. Destruction of forests has also reduced
populations. If the bats become extinct, it could affect the ecology of
the islands, as the animals pollinate plants and disperse seeds.

Some species of the bat are protected under Appendix 2, but wildlife
officials in the US believe that this protection may not suffice. While
Guam requires licences for imports, other territories in the Northern Marianas
Islands do not. The result, say wildlife experts, is unregulated trade that
the US, which administers the territories, cannot manage.

Trade in flora will also raise more controversy than ever before. Several
genera of heavily traded plants are being proposed for Appendix 1, which
would take them out of trade. ‘This is the first time we will be treading
heavily on the toes of industry,’ says Faith Campbell of the Natural Resources
Defense Council, an environmental group in the US.

Probably the world’s most frequently traded genus is Galanthus, the
snowdrop. Most species are propagated; the Netherlands raises and sells
a large percentage of the world supply. The greatest diversity of species
is in Turkey, which exported 22 million bulbs to the Netherlands last year.
According to botanists, most bulbs exported are gathered from the wild.
The Netherlands may oppose the proposal by the US to list snowdrops of Appendix
2, which will set limits and require permits for trade.

If endangered flora have a flagship, it is the orchid, some species
of which have disappeared altogether from the wild (see ‘The case of the
stolen slippers’, ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ, 24 June). Pahpiopedilum, a genus known
as the Asian lady’s-slipper orchid, will be proposed for listing on Appendix
1. Orchid fanciers in the US alone import about 50 000 of these plants yearly,
and the number is growing, according to TRAFFIC. About 70 per cent come
from Thailand, and most are believed to be collected from the wild and smuggled
without permits.

Less eye-catching but also endangered are species of the palm known
as Chamaedorea. The pinnate, feathery leaves from these palms, endemic to
Central and South America, are becoming very popular in horticultural displays
and among florists. Some 360 million leaves were exported to the US in 1986.
Opposition to listing nine species on Appendix 1 and another nine on Appendix
2 will arise because two species, C. seifrizii and C. elegans, are artificially
propagated quite successfully, says Nina Marshall, a botanist with the World
Wildlife Fund in the US. But collection is becoming very heavy as demand
increases, and rare species look very similar to the propagated ones.

For the first time, delegates to CITES will have an official list of
who has been violating the convention. The secretariat has tabulated infractions
of the treaty, which range from forged permits for exports of animals to
systematic efforts to bypass the convention. One country, Egypt, simply
refuses to reply to requests for information about trade in wildlife. Others
that ‘rarely’ reply are Ecuador, Italy, Senegal, Spain and Thailand.

Examples of illegal trade in species on Appendix 1 include: Two baby
tigers and two Asian bear cubs seized in Hong Kong. They came from Thailand
and were destined for a zoo in Taiwan. There were no documents explaining
the shipment on board.

A cargo labelled ‘tropical fish’ exported from Nigeria to Norway that
broke open in transit while in West Germany. Out leapt a protected Nile
crocodile and 270 frogs. The shipment was sent on, and the crocodile is
now in a Norwegian zoo. CITES did not report the fate of the frogs.

Numerous seizures of protected birds, mostly macaws and various species
of parrot, destined for Europe from South and Central America. Peregrine
falcons from Spain were secreted in the wells for spare wheels in cars and
parrots were packed in suitcases.

Much of the illegal trade in birds and animal skins has been going to
Spain, according to CITES. Whether violating Appendix 1 or 2, forged documents
worldwide are becoming increasingly common. ‘There are still cases,’ the
secretariat notes, ‘where an infraction is deliberate and is due to domestic
policy, economic reasons or even corruption.’

Large-scale fraud persists as well. In December 1987, Argentina re-exported
to Italy several thousand skins of the caiman, a protected crocodilian from
South America. They had originally come from Bolivia. The shipment had a
chequered past: the secretariat had advised France in 1985 not to take the
shipment, as the permits were considered invalid. In 1987, Argentina tried
to ship 7923 caiman skins to Japan using re-export permits from Spain and
Bolivia. Japan declined after consulting the secretariat. Eventually, Argentina
sold the skins to Italy, which had obtained permission from the European
Community to import them.

The other large-scale deception described by the secretariat involves
coral sold to Europe and the US by traders in the Philippines, despite a
ban by the Philippine government. Some permits are forged, CITES officials
have found, while others are signed by Philippine officials illegally.