[Wanted] Isthmura bellii male

Originally Posted by radbackedsalamander

Sadly all are illegally smuggled (even the ones zoos buy), me personally I am strongly against buying them.

That was my suspicion, that this is a thread that is seeking to purchase illegal animals. I appreciate the knowledgeable confirmation.

Also - yes I will totally keep you in mind if I manage to breed my torosas. I have never been able to decide if I like torosa or granulosa better but I do appreciate that the torosa seem to use land and water areas equally, which make them really cool vivarium residents.

Also - I did not know that they were all illegal and I am not seeking to purchase illegal animals. Mine have a very long owner history that as far as I’m aware is from European captive bred animals.

Yeah I haven't seen any really in the past year at all. But it's also for the better because this is a species that is really susceptible to over collection. Though I'll let you know.

Also do you breed anything else?

For a while I had bred eastern newts but that was many years ago, and I had given them to a friend when there was a death in my family. For now these are my only two caudate species.

Originally Posted by Roughskinned

European captive bred animals.

FYI -- that's very often code for 'smuggled stock'. Various European countries are known established smuggling hubs, and 'CB' isn't always CB, as plenty of laundering goes on (and CB from smuggled stock is illegal in the US anyway).

If they're that challenging to breed (and more than 30 years out from the possibility of past legal exports), then such suspicions have a higher probability of being accurate, especially when knowledgeable folks claim offhand that "if you treat them for disease and get them comfortably established" implying that WC stock is the norm.

Shoot - I didn’t know about that code

Alright then - I’ll be sticking to the same policy as Alex on this one. If I can find a seller I trust (geographically or otherwise) I’ll do my best to captive breed so that hopefully any thought of smuggling will disappear. To my knowledge, only very few people have bred California newts in the US, and I got extraordinarily close this year, I’m just going to hope and put the work in.

Originally Posted by Roughskinned

Shoot - I didn’t know about that code

Alright then - I’ll be sticking to the same policy as Alex on this one. If I can find a seller I trust (geographically or otherwise) I’ll do my best to captive breed so that hopefully any thought of smuggling will disappear. To my knowledge, only very few people have bred California newts in the US, and I got extraordinarily close this year, I’m just going to hope and put the work in.

Yes, California Newts (Taricha torosa) are also tricky to get legally so it would be awesome if you could breed them for the masses again. California is the only legal collection place and you can only collect 4 and it can't be for profit. So if you see a California Newt for sale it is probably illegally collected in mass then sold for profit but there is often not enough proof. And same thing with Red-bellied Newt (Taricha rivularis), they used to be legally collected but then Cali banned collection and most/all sales (they are VERY rarely sold) claim to be grandfathered but there is no proof for this either. And also something that is illegal that happens is genuinely on accident rivularis comes in on granulosa shipments and many people get them that way too because both have overlapping range and look similar when you don't pay attention.

Which is of course making me wonder about mine - they were sold to me as granulosa about 5 years ago.

Originally Posted by Roughskinned

Shoot - I didn’t know about that code

Alright then - I’ll be sticking to the same policy as Alex on this one. If I can find a seller I trust (geographically or otherwise) I’ll do my best to captive breed so that hopefully any thought of smuggling will disappear. To my knowledge, only very few people have bred California newts in the US, and I got extraordinarily close this year, I’m just going to hope and put the work in.

I was anticipating this thread going sideways, but I was wrong. I applaud your attitude. Even better would be to bail on the one you have and get involved in something 100% legal, but the direction you're headed is a good one.

You'd better beef up your vetting game, though, and in a big way. You made an inquiry a couple months back that was virtually 100% certain to be animals that came in WC directly. A lot can be intuited from the range of species a person is offering, and whether their ad history implies that they're breeding these animals or something else.

Good to get familiar with the range of info available at cites.org. trade.cites.org is a database of all the CITES imports and exports. checklist.cites.org is a list of all the listed species and dates of listing. And at FWS, here's the list of salamander species prohibited from import due to Bsal prevention.

"That code" is the Lacey Act. It is here.

And just keeping an eye on all the threads here to see which ones get called out for suspicion of illegality can be very educational as well.