Nearly 30,000 Unregulated Wild Animal Species Traded in the U.S., Researchers Find [Video]

New international research has found that nearly 30,000 wild animal species have been traded throughout the United States, according to data from the U.S. Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS), a wildlife trade monitoring organization maintained by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Led by University of Hong Kong (HKU), the analysis looked at 22 years of trade data involving over 2.85 billion individual animals, half of them taxa taken from the wild, a press release from University of Adelaide said.

“The United States is one of the world’s largest wildlife importers and is unique in documenting trade in species not covered by international regulation,” said Freyja Watters, a Ph.D. student with the Wildlife Crime Research Hub at University of Adelaide, in the press release. “We uncovered tens of thousands of wild species and billions of individual animals entering trade, most without any global oversight.”

The researchers also discovered that just a small fraction — not even 0.01 …