- Thousands of tokay geckos (Gekko gecko), native to South and Southeast Asia, are sold each year in Hong Kong’s traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) pharmacies.
- Recent studies have raised questions on the sustainability of this trade and the origins of the geckos, as vendors’ claims don’t agree with data in the CITES database, exposing data discrepancies in legal trade.
- Without stricter oversight, these discrepancies could result in unsustainable trade and facilitate illegal trafficking of tokay geckos in the region, say conservationists, who urge countries and CITES to better monitor the trade.
Tokay geckos (Gekko gecko), named after their characteristic “to-kay” calls, are among the largest geckos in the world and inhabit rainforests and human-modified landscapes across South and Southeast Asia. As nature’s pest control, they are vital to the ecosystem, and their bright spots are favored in the pet trade. But for many humans, these colorful lizards seem to be more valuable when dead, as their gutted, flattened and dried bodies are used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).
“They’re sold in traditional Chinese medicine shops around the world,” says Chris Shepherd, executive director at the Monitor Conservation Research Society in Canada, who has studied the tokay gecko trade for more than a decade. Growing demand for tokay geckos in the TCM market, largely from mainland China and Hong Kong, has made them one of the most traded reptiles on the planet.
“The volume of tokay geckos is terrifying. … They’re being traded in the millions,” Shepherd says.
In a recent publication in the journal Integrative Conservation, Shepherd and his colleagues have raised concerns about the alarming trends in the trade of tokay geckos in Hong Kong, which is among the largest importers of the species. They cite two independent surveys published in 2024 that looked at how widely tokay geckos were sold in Hong Kong’s TCM pharmacies. A 2021 survey of 169 shops and clinics found tokay geckos sold in 59% of them, while a 2022 survey led by Shepherd found the lizards sold in 37% of 150 shops.
Based on data collected by the two surveys, researchers estimated that nearly a quarter of a million tokay geckos were traded in Hong Kong each year by TCM vendors, and close to 15,000 were available for sale on any given day. In most cases, they were sold as dried pairs stretched on bamboo frames, for an average price of $12 for two geckos, and the total retail value of the stock was close to $180,000.
“This is an absolutely massive level of trade for any single species to incur,” says wildlife trade researcher Alice Hughes from the University of Hong Kong, who was not involved in the surveys.
Tokay geckos are harvested from the wild in most parts where they are found, mainly for use in traditional medicine. While mainland China and Hong Kong are major importers, exporters include Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, which tops the list. In 2022 alone, Indonesia exported more than 5 million geckos.
A trade mired in controversy
The unrelenting demand for tokay geckos in recent years has fueled large volumes of legal and illegal trade in its native range. In Indonesia, the legal harvest quota of tokay geckos from the wild increased from 40,000 in 2019 to 1.9 million in 2021, which then ballooned to 8.2 million in 2022. The country says that the 8.2 million figure is only about half of the total number of tokay geckos exported in 2019, implying that the harvest was much greater than the quotas issued before.
In 2014, to meet the demand for geckos in the pet trade, the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry permitted commercial breeding with a target of producing 3 million geckos each year. However, a 2015 investigation by TRAFFIC, an international NGO working on wildlife trade, found that setting up the infrastructure needed to breed so many geckos was expensive and impractical and concluded that the geckos would end up being sourced from the wild and falsely declared as being captive-bred.
“If indeed the breeders were breeding the numbers they said they were breeding, we would be able to see their operation from space,” says Shepherd, who is also a co-author of the TRAFFIC report.
Although the IUCN Red List categorizes tokay geckos as a species of least concern, they are slowly vanishing from many parts of their native range. The tokay is now listed as endangered in China, as threatened in Vietnam and as highly endangered in India, and that’s largely due to trade in the species, Hughes says. Despite these concerns about their wild populations, their population trends are unknown.
“For any species traded at these volumes, we really should be conducting a rigorous assessment on the impact on the ground,” Hughes says. But for tokay geckos in trade, there are no known studies on their population genetics and genetic diversity to infer if their current trade numbers are sustainable. “None of those things have been done.”
In 2019, the tokay gecko was added to Appendix II of CITES, the international wildlife trade agreement, to monitor and regulate legal international trade in the species. However, researchers say their legal and illegal trade persists, with a big part of the legal trade unregulated and unmonitored, a fact highlighted by the two surveys in Hong Kong.
During the surveys, researchers were told the geckos sold in Hong Kong’s shops came from mainland China, Thailand and Vietnam and not from Indonesia. However, data in the CITES database, which records all legal international trade of tokay geckos based on export and import permits, tell a different story. Vietnam has no export records for tokay geckos in 2021 and 2022 to any country, including Hong Kong. While local media reports say Indonesia has exported large numbers of individuals to Hong Kong in 2020 and 2021, the CITES database has only a few hundred individuals exported from Indonesia, showing gaps in data.
To add to the international trade driven by demand from TCM, there’s also domestic trade that isn’t regulated or documented, as well as the pet trade.
“We don’t know how many are in trade, apart from the ones listed on the CITES permits, and even those permits, I think, need to be scrutinized,” says Shepherd, talking about the gaping data gaps. “So what’s going on, really?”
Need better monitoring of CITES data
Discrepancies in the CITES database are not unheard of. A 2015 dissertation found that nearly 90% of all CITES trade records from Africa contained discrepancies in data such as the number of individuals of species traded, the CITES Appendix they were listed on, their origin and the purpose of trade. The discrepancies, seen in the tokay gecko trade, could facilitate illegal trafficking for species that are easy to hide and transport and don’t receive much scrutiny.
“It’s an easy form of smuggling,” Shepherd says, adding that corruption, false declarations on permits and insufficient oversight can all lead to data gaps. “You put one number on the permit and a different number of actual individuals in the boxes.”
Hughes says the discrepancy could also be because vendors aren’t always in the know about the source of their wildlife products. “They get them from a wholesaler here [in Hong Kong], and the wholesaler may just say they come from Vietnam,” she says. “It may just be a lack of understanding of what the dynamics are, and they may not care enough to ask.”
Without sufficient data, it’s also impossible to determine whether the current levels of legal trade determined by quotas in Indonesia are sustainable. For Appendix II species, CITES export permits can be issued only if a country’s scientific authority certifies that trade in the species will not be detrimental to its survival — also called the non-detrimental finding. For tokay geckos, whose wild populations and trade volumes are sketchy, the researchers recommend rigorous scientific monitoring to ensure the trade is sustainable.
“I strongly encourage the CITES secretariat to look at tokay geckos for the sake of tokay geckos, but also to look into the fraud that tokay geckos exemplify of this laundering of wild animals as captive-bred,” Shepherd says, adding that the onus is also on countries party to the CITES convention to ensure proper documentation of the trade.
“The convention is a tool — it’s the country using the tool that’s responsible for how effective it is,” he says.
Banner image: A tokay gecko in Indonesia. Indonesia is the world’s largest exporter of these geckos, with more than 8 million harvest quotas issued in 2022. Image courtesy by Rhett Butler/Mongabay.
Citations:
Chan, J. Y., Dingle, C., Nijman, V., & Shepherd, C. R. (2024). Surveys on tokay gecko trade as traditional Chinese medicine in Hong Kong put spotlight on imports from Indonesia and Vietnam. Integrative Conservation, 3(4), 287-289. https://doi.org/10.1002/inc3.70
Wang, Y., Dufour, P. C., Yeung, K. Y., Lo, S. Y., Cheung, C. C., Dingle, C., Bonebrake, T. C., & Mumby, H. S. (2023). Sustainability of medicinal animal products: Tokay geckos and pangolin scales as traditional Chinese medicine. Integrative Conservation, 2(4), 176-186. https://doi.org/10.1002/inc3.35
Chan, J. Y., Nijman, V., & Shepherd, C. R. (2024). The trade of tokay geckos Gekko gecko in retail pharmaceutical outlets in Hong Kong. European Journal of Wildlife Research, 70(1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10344-023-01762-3
Kurniati, H., Munir, M., Sidik, I., Riyanto, A., Hamidy, A., Mumpuni, Rini, R.L.,Nopiansyah, F., Haryono, M., Widiyanto, D., Chandradewi, D.S. (2023). Non-Detriment Findings (NDF): Tokay gecko In Indonesian Archipelago (Gekkonidae: Gekko gecko). Research Organization for Life Sciences and Environment, The National Research and Innovation Agency — Directorate General of Nature Resources and Ecosystem Conservation, The Ministry of Environment and Forestry. 45 pp + iv. Retrieved from https://cites.org/sites/default/files/ndf_material/NDF%20for%20Tokay%20Gecko%20in%20Indonesian%20archipelago.pdf
Russo, A. (2015). The prevalence of documentation discrepancies in CITES (Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) trade data for Appendix I and II species exported out of Africa between the years 2003 and 2012 (Doctoral dissertation, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa). Retrieved from https://science.uct.ac.za/sites/default/files/content_migration/science_uct_ac_za/841/files/Russo.%25202015.pdf
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