The annual trade in exotic vertebrates as pets is a multi‐billion‐dollar global business. Thousands of species, and tens of millions of individual animals, are shipped both internationally and within countries to satisfy this demand. Most research on the exotic pet trade has focused on its contribution to native biodiversity loss and disease spread. Here, we synthesize information across taxa and research disciplines to document the exotic pet trade's contribution to vertebrate biological invasions. We show recent and substantial worldwide growth in the number of non‐native animal populations introduced via this invasion pathway, which demonstrates a strong potential to increase the number of invasive animals in the future. Key to addressing the invasion threat of exotic pets is learning more about the socioeconomic forces that drive the massive growth in the exotic pet market and the socioecological factors that underlie pet release by owners. These factors likely vary according to cultural pet‐keeping traditions across regions and whether purchases were legal or illegal. These gaps in our understanding of the exotic pet trade must be addressed in order to implement effective policy solutions.

Abstract1. The number of alien reptiles and amphibians introduced and established worldwide 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 hypothesize 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 retail prices. The number imported and price interacted with longevity and adult mass to produce nonlinear increases in release probability.The most important interaction revealed that large-bodied species imported in high quantities have a three times higher release probability compared to largebodied species imported in lower quantities. Policy implications.Our results provide guidance towards targeting exotic pet reptile and amphibian species that are at a high risk of being released. Species that are both prevalent in the pet trade and large-bodied or long-lived have the highest probability of being released. This will aid in developing education and policy solutions aimed at decreasing the rate at which these pets are released, thus curtailing the invasion process before these species can establish and impacts can occur.

The unrivaled growth in e-commerce of animals and plants presents an unprecedented opportunity to monitor wildlife trade to inform conservation, biosecurity, and law enforcement. Using the internet to quantify the scale of the wildlife trade (volume and frequency) is a relatively recent and rapidly developing approach that lacks an accessible framework for locating relevant websites and collecting data. We produced an accessible guide for internet-based wildlife trade surveillance. We detailed a repeatable method involving a systematic internet search, with search engines, to locate relevant websites and content. For data collection, we highlight web-scraping technology as an efficient way to collect data in an automated fashion at regularly timed intervals. Our guide is applicable to the multitude of trade-based contexts because researchers can tailor search keywords for specific taxa or derived products and locations of interest. We provide information for working with the diversity of websites used in wildlife trade. For example, to locate relevant content on social media (e.g., posts or groups), each social media platform should be examined individually via the site's internal search engine. A key advantage of using the internet to study wildlife trade is the relative ease of access to an increasing amount of trade-related data. However, not all wildlife trade occurs online and it may occur on unobservable sections of the internet.

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The international trade in exotic vertebrate pets provides key social and economic benefits but also drives associated ecological, ethical, and human health impacts. However, despite its clear importance, we currently lack a full understanding of the structure of the pet trade, hampering efforts to optimize its benefits while mitigating its negative effects. In the present article, we represent and review the structure of the pet trade as a network composed of different market actors (nodes) and trade flows (links). We identify key data gaps in this network that, if filled, would enable network analyses to pinpoint targets for management. As a case study of how data-informed networks can realize this goal, we quantified spatial and temporal patterns in pets imported to the United States. Our framework and case study illustrate how network approaches can help to inform and manage the effects of the growing demand for exotic pets.

The international wildlife trade presents severe conservation and environmental security risks, yet no international regulatory framework exists to monitor the trade of species not listed in the appendices of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). We explored the composition and dynamics of internationally regulated versus nonregulated trade, with a focus on importations of wild‐caught terrestrial vertebrates entering the United States from 2009 to 2018. We used 10 years of species‐level trade records of the numbers of live, wild‐caught animals imported to the United States and data on International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates of extinction risk to determine whether there were differences in the diversity, abundance, and risk to extinction among imports of CITES‐listed versus unlisted species. We found 3.6 times the number of unlisted species in U.S. imports compared with CITES‐listed species (1366 vs. 378 species). The CITES‐listed species were more likely to face reported conservation threats relative to unlisted species (71.7% vs. 27.5%). However, 376 unlisted species faced conversation threats, 297 species had unknown population trends, and 139 species were without an evaluation by the IUCN. Unlisted species appearing for the first time in records were imported 5.5 times more often relative to CITES‐listed species. Unlisted reptiles had the largest rate of entry, averaging 53 unique species appearing in imports for the first time per year. Overall trade quantities were approximately 11 times larger for imports of unlisted species relative to imports of CITES‐listed species. Countries that were top exporters of CITES‐listed species were mostly different from exporters of unlisted species. Because of the vulnerabilities of unlisted, traded species entering the United States and increasing global demand, we strongly recommend governments adapt their policies to monitor and report on the trade of all wildlife.

Globalisation of the live pet trade facilitates major pathways for the transport and introduction of invasive alien species across longer distances and at higher frequencies than previously possible. Moreover, the unsustainable trade of species is a major driver for the over-exploitation of wild populations. Australia minimises the biosecurity and conservation risk of the international pet trade by implementing highly stringent regulations on the live import and keeping of alien pets beyond its international CITES obligations. However, the public desire to possess prohibited alien pets has never been quantified and represents a number of species that could be acquired illegally or legally under different future legislative conditions. As such, highly desirable species represent an ongoing conservation threat and biosecurity risk via the pet-release invasion pathway. We aimed to characterise the Australian desire for illegal alien pets and investigate potential sources of external information that can be utilised to predict future desire. Using public live import enquiry records from the Australian Commonwealth Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment as a proxy for alien pet desire, we tested for differences in the proportion of species with threatened listings and records of invasions, after accounting for taxonomy. Additionally, we used a United States of America (U.S.) live imports dataset to infer pet demand in another Western market with less stringent regulations and determined whether species highly desired in Australia had higher U.S. trade demand than would be expected by chance. The Australian public desire for alien pets is heavily and significantly biased towards species threatened with extinction, species popular in the U.S. trade and species with a history of successful invasions. Not only does this indicate the potential impacts of pet desire on invasion risk and the conservation of threatened species, but we also highlight the potential role of the U.S. trade as an effective predictor for Australian desire. Our research emphasises the value of novel datasets in building predictive capacity for improved biosecurity awareness.