South Africa’s rare and enigmatic sungazer lizards (Smaug giganteus) are named after Smaug, the fiery dragon of Middle-Earth in JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit. (Wikipedia)
Heavily-armoured and covered in spiny scales, South Africa’s rare and enigmatic sungazer lizards (Smaug giganteus) are named after Smaug, the fiery dragon of Middle-Earth in JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
But it is the 20 million-year-old threatened species of lizard found only in South Africa that is under attack, poached from their self-excavated burrows in the Highveld grasslands of the Free State and Mpumalanga, for the lucrative international exotic pet trade.
Sungazers, which are the largest lizards in the girdled lizard group, are “amazingly charismatic”, said Shivan Parusnath, the African regional director for the National Geographic Society, who was awarded his PhD in zoology and researches the population genetics of the species – and the illegal reptile trade.
Their rarity and dragon-like appearance is what makes them sought after in the global pet trade, which is contributing to their decline. Parusnath said the long-lived sungazers are one of the top five reptile species exported from South Africa. And, because sungazers do not breed in captivity, all the animals in the global trade come directly from the country’s threatened populations.
Reptile smugglers sentenced
Last month, Gauteng couple Gerald and Elisha van der Westhuizen were sentenced in the Kempton Park regional court for their role in smuggling sungazers from South Africa.
Gerald van der Westhuizen was sentenced to a fine of R1 million of which half was suspended for five years on condition that he is not convicted of a similar offence.
His wife was sentenced to five years direct imprisonment, with the sentence wholly suspended for five years on condition that she is not convicted of contravening the Prevention of Organised Crime Act.
Their illicit activity was intercepted on 24 May 2019, when South African Revenue Service customs officials were conducting routine inspections at OR Tambo International Airport’s international mail centre and found a parcel destined for Germany, which contained six sungazer lizards, two of which were dead.
The contents were falsely declared as “gift teddy and candies” and the animals were hidden inside a stuffed toy. The parcel was addressed to M Drescher, in Germany, with the sender’s details and address false.
Two years later, on 19 November 2021, German citizens Daniel Lohde and Marko Drescher were nabbed in the Northern Cape while illegally catching and trading in reptiles, including armadillo girdled lizards — a threatened and protected species — geckos and tortoises, with the intention to smuggle them out of South Africa into the international exotic pet trade. They were convicted of the illegal possession and attempted export of listed reptiles.
Cell phone analysis revealed detailed WhatsApp conversations, voice notes and photographs between Lohde and Gerald van der Westhuizen pertaining to the export of sungazer lizards. The South African had illegally sent sungazer lizards to Germany and Mexico on three occasions.
Rampant illicit trade
Sungazers can fetch thousands of dollars internationally, with the main markets being Japan, Germany and the United States. Parusnath said that most of the people involved in the illegal trade are from these countries.
“Primarily, like in the Netherlands and Germany, you get a lot of citizens of those countries that come to South Africa, poach stuff and then they themselves take it [out of the country] in their suitcases. It’s not as common to have South Africans involved in this because the big money comes from international trade,” he said.
In the past decade, there has been a concerted effort to raise the profile of the illegal reptile trade and “it’s very cool to see the work we’ve done starting to show itself in our legal system”, Parusnath said.
Convictions and sentences such as those meted out to the Van der Westhuizens help set precedent and show that South Africa is taking the illicit reptile trade seriously. “But, at the same time, there’s going to be a demand for these reptiles. So, until we have better systems in place, we’re still going to have this poaching.
“In my mind, rhino poaching is no different to sungazer poaching. They’re both species that can’t handle this kind of poaching.”
Parusnath said recent research has shown that reptiles are the number one group of traded animals in the world, making up more than half of all traded animals globally. The illegal reptile trade is the third biggest in the world after drugs and weapons.
Reptiles are ectotherms, or cold-blooded, “so they don’t show up necessarily on the thermal scans and when they do get a bit cooler, they stop moving as much so they’re fairly still”.
“They have slower metabolic rates, so they don’t need to eat, drink and breathe quite as often … and I don’t mean that they don’t need to breathe and that if you put them in a box they’ll survive, because a lot of reptiles end up dying because of suffocation and starvation, but they can handle it better than a mammal can,” he said.
He added that reptiles are “poached alive” and “sent across the world, alive”.
Big money
Graham Alexander, a professor of herpetology at the University of the Witwatersrand and a leading authority on reptiles, explained that although the illicit trade of reptiles is not as high profile as rhino horn or pangolin scales, “in a lot of respects, it is probably resulting in the same sort of money changing hands”.
With the Van der Westhuizen matter, two of the six sungazers had died but four were alive “so, I guess, as long as some of them are not dead when they get to the other side, the smugglers are willing to take that loss, because they can make so much money out of it”.
There have been cases of people getting permits to export sungazers on the pretext that they were captive-bred. “Sungazers generally don’t breed in captivity and there are only very few records, literally like three,” he said.
They give birth to live young, typically two, and a female will only breed every second year.
“The reproductive output is very low and certainly where people are exporting 100 or more sungazers, they were laundered, they were wild-caught, poached animals. It’s just that they got away with saying they were captive-bred.”
Parusnath’s research showed, for the first time, that sungazers have a family structure where the babies stay with their parents for 10 to 15 years. A colony of sungazers is made up of a family where the cousins live next to each other and the aunts and uncles live alongside each other.
“It’s like a society that we are used to.”
Johan Marais, who runs the African Snakebite Institute and who is a leading reptile expert in Africa, said there had been a “massive shift” in how seriously reptile crime is being taken in South Africa, by the courts and the government.
The government is beginning to realise “it’s part of our natural heritage, it’s really problematic and that reptile smuggling still ranks up the top of three smuggling networks in the world”.
But smugglers are becoming more sophisticated.
“Because of all these laws, what the smugglers are now doing is resorting to claiming the reptiles that they are exporting are captive-bred, because the law makes provision that if you can breed an animal, you can export the progeny,” Marais said. “We are seeing, with rinkhals for instance, hundreds of them being exported and nobody is breeding them commercially, so these are all just lies.”
The weak spot is KwaZulu-Natal where “guys claim they are breeding chameleons and certain snakes and lizards and … they quite easily are getting permits”, he said.
“We know that a lot of these animals are not captive-bred. Recently, there were lizards poached in Mpumalanga and shipped out of South Africa from KwaZulu-Natal with permits.”
Marais said the most recent price he was quoted for sungazers was $3 000 each and the “prices are going up”. In a single day, poachers can wipe out an entire colony.
The illegal trade in reptiles has become more specialised. “They are looking for the really rare snakes, like some of these dwarf adders, some that are known from 30 individuals that science ever captured, but there’s more than 30 of them in the overseas pet trade … dwarf chameleons, dwarf adders, armadillo lizards, sungazers and there’s now also the girdled lizards.”
At the provincial level, “there has to be far more thought going into any permit that is issued because these permits are just issued far too readily and, more often than not, it is wild-caught animals that are being exported as so called captive-bred”.