[Wanted] Isthmura bellii male

Yeah that's becoming more and more apparent to me. I'm not new to keeping caudates, but I am pretty new to buying animals online. When I started you could find paddletails in a random pet store.

I never thought it would be an easy or commonly done thing to illegally sell animals. I always thought they checked boxes and bags for these things and that there was basically no way to get away with it. And animals that were smuggled would be on the dark web or something like that. Evidently such is not the case

I feel bad, I really only want these animals to have futures, and with the slew of environmental issues they're facing, the prospect seems more and more unlikely, but thats a separate issue. Thank you both for informing me better.

Yes sadly illegal animals are quite common due to loopholes and mislabeling. Like the way they smuggle Bolitoglossa dofleini is from illegaly harvesting them in Honduras (where it is illegal to ship them out) then they send them to Nicaragua, but then they get shipped from Nicaragua to the US saying that they were from Nicaragua but in reality dofleini don't exist in Nicaragua...

Every Genus native or endemic to Latin America is non-injurious, I'm sure there are a few Plethadon species that might have a tiny range in there, but I wouldn't consider them native. Legally all these species can be imported into the United States if they have the correct paperwork. I would say almost all that are brought in are from frog importers, as they are mostly imported with large frog imports. Most of these imports are checked, but the US Fish and Wildlife seems to let them through. I personally don't keep any of these species, but if they are cleared by US Fish & Wildlife they should be considered illegal, even if F&W doesn't know what they are doing. I also don't support people bringing them into the US because they are usually in bad health. Also, the statement only 2 people have bred them in the US is total garbage, of course, that person claims that, because he thinks he is the first to breed everything. There are so many species of Caudate that are in the US that most don't know about, I mean look at some of these older collections, people had Lyciasalamandra and Liua in the US, and I don't doubt they are still here. People who keep stuff like that don't publically post it anymore, since they would get hounded or told they were smuggled.

I think you don't understand, it is legal to import but illegal to export from their native countries. Mexico and Guatemala are super strict on collections.

I definitely understand that. There are other countries they exist in though, and again I’m not saying any are legally brought in, just it is possible that some may be legal.