Pet problems: Biological and economic factors that influence the release of alien reptiles and amphibians by pet owners

By O. Stringham, Julie L. Lockwood. Journal of Applied Ecology, 2018

95 citations recorded by the source corpus.

1. The number of alien reptiles and amphibians introduced and established world wide has increased over the last decades. The legal pet trade is now the dominant pathway by which individuals of these species arrive in their non-native locale. Despite its importance, specific factors of pet trade pathway that influence the release (introduction) of exotic reptiles and amphibians have not yet been examined. 2. We set out to identify broadscale and easily measured biological and economic factors that influence the release of these exotic pets by their owners. We hy pothesize that biological factors reflect the cost of care, and economic factors reflect the value that owners place on their pet, both of which can influence the probability when a pet is released. We collected life history and economic data on the 1,722 species of reptiles and amphibians sold within the US as pets over the last 18 years. We also compiled a list of pet trade-attributed releases in the US (i.e., all free-living species regardless of whether they successfully established). We used boosted regression trees to correlate species release status with their life-history traits and economic attributes ( r 2 = 0.51, AUC = 0.89). 3. We found that species with a high probability of being released were imported at higher quantities over our period of record, have a relatively large adult mass and commanded cheaper

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/27358feca5d44d7e2d957c2ba6e22e3520ca1ecf

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In Ecology

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Unwelcome exchange: International trade as a direct and indirect driver of biological invasions worldwide (2021, background): “Thus the likelihood that an alien reptile established in the United States from 1999 onward was associated with the number of imports of each species as pets since that time.(63) Analyses of this kind can be relatively straightforward for contemporary records of alien species introductions, but are ”