Herpetofauna trade via e-commerce in Indonesia

Abstract

Sales of wildlife on a commercial scale using various online platform has been occurring for some time however, research related to online wildlife trade in Indonesia, especially herpetofauna, is still limited. This study aims to examine the herpetofauna trade on a popular e-commerce platforms in Indonesia, namely: Tokopedia, Shopee, Lazada, and Bukalapak, using a web scraping application data retrieval method. Web scraping is a technique to get information from the website automatically without having to copy it manually. The results recorded 117 species of the herpetofauna from 38 families, comprising 106 species of reptiles (90.6%) and 11 species of amphibians (9.4%). Eublepharis macularius (leopard gecko) was the most offered species in each e-commerce, whereas Trachemys scripta (red-eared slider) was the most sold species. Six species were included under the protected animals list according to the Ministry of Environment and Forestry No. 106 from 2018, which were Crocodylus porosus (saltwater crocodile), Morelia viridis (green tree python), Python bivittatus (Burmese python), Orlitia borneensis (Malaysian giant turtle), Varanus nebulosus (clouded monitor) and Varanus panoptes (argus monitor). Based on the province, the highest trade occurs in West Java, followed by Jakarta. The total economic value during the period of 2017 to 2022 is IDR 3,355,750,470.