The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has recently proposed listing the Borneo earless monitor, an elusive lizard endemic to the Southeast Asian island of Borneo, as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
Borneo earless monitors (Lanthanotus borneensis) are illegally trafficked for the international pet trade. Finalizing the threatened listing would prohibit the import, export and sale of wild-sourced Borneo earless monitors in the U.S., while still allowing trade in captive-bred individuals.
“It is a good start in providing better international protection for this globally threatened species,” Vincent Nijman from Oxford Brookes University, U.K., who has studied the trafficking of these lizards, told Mongabay by email. “To me the threats faced by the species, its rarity, the limited amount of knowledge we have about its biology, and applying precautionary principle, would justify it to be listed as ‘endangered.’”
The Borneo earless monitor is a carnivorous, semiaquatic, nocturnal lizard that spends much of its time buried underground in the rainforest floor of Borneo. Although first described in 1878, sightings have been so rare and so little is known about it that scientists have dubbed it the “Holy Grail of herpetology.”
The species is globally endangered, with decreasing populations, and is protected across the three countries that share the island of Borneo: Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. It’s also listed on Appendix II of CITES, the international wildlife trade agreement, meaning its international trade is regulated.
Yet, a 2014 report by wildlife trade watchdog TRAFFIC, co-authored by Nijman, found that despite these protections, many individuals smuggled out of Borneo were listed for sale online. Even today, the U.S., EU and Japan are the top destinations for trafficked reptiles from Southeast Asia, including the earless monitor, Nijman said.
Nijman and other conservationists say they worry the proposed threatened status listing in the U.S. won’t adequately protect the species. Since trade in captive-bred earless monitors is still permitted, they say individuals collected from the wild will continue to be passed off as captive-bred with fraudulent paperwork, as observed with other reptiles from Indonesia.
They add that since the Borneo earless monitor is protected across its range, every individual seen in zoos or kept as a pet must be considered trafficked or a direct descendant of a trafficked individual. In addition to trade, the species is also threatened by climate change and rapidly loss of rainforests in Borneo due to logging, wildfires and conversion to agricultural plantations; nearly half of the island’s primary rainforest was lost between 1973 and 2015.
“Continuing to allow imports of earless monitor lizards from Indonesia almost certainly guarantees that the species will be collected from the wild and trafficked out of the country,” said Dianne DuBois, a staff scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, a U.S.-based NGO. “Anything short of a strict ban on trade allows that market to continue and pushes the lizard closer to extinction.”
Banner image: Borneo earless monitor. Image by Vojtěch Víta via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).
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