I got to thinking about it after thinking about ways to estimate the relative size of the U.S. hobby and note any trends in species popularity. There was a poll a while back asking how many people were involved in the hobby, but I was curious about the volume of animals coming into the country. I pulled CITES data from as many species as I could think of, and filtered the data for "US" and "live" imports.The height of importation seems to be in 2008 to 2010, where roughly 10,000 animals were imported per year. This figure seems to have fallen to 5,000 to 6,000 per year from 2010 to 2013. This of course does not tell us how big the CB trade is, but the trends per species is interesting. Here's the full graphic:
- You will have to click on this graphic to be able to read it. Note the micro plots on the left are not to scale by row - I used them to illustrate trends - had I fixed the max scale the auratus numbers would swamp all other species.
The trend that was interesting to me was the drop in imports of auratus around 2009-2010 and the increase of pumilio around 2004-2005:
- frog-import-top3.png (27.94 KiB) Viewed 2504 times
The low import counts on tincs was surprising to me, as was the high number of Pumilio. Here is the full top three with the annual import totals:
I don't know what to make of the sylvatica / histrionica numbers matching each other 1:1. One of you large Oophaga keepers probably will come up with a better hypothesis than me.
One of the most surprising aspects of the data to me was the Mantella numbers. I had no idea how heavily imported they were. Note how they dominate the list when added:
- Again you'll need to click on this one to read it.
I didn't look at all imports world wide, or exports by country, but I have pulled all that data and I have it in a single spreadsheet which will make it relatively easy to plot those views. Anyhow I don't know how to interpret all this yet, but I thought it might be interesting to share and discuss. Feel free to ask for alternate views and I'll see what I can pull together. It's definitely interesting stuff...
