Three species of teatfish to be protected by CITES

The 18th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (CoP18) to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) (CITES Secretariat 2009a) was held in Geneva in August 2019. As a result of two and a half years of work outlined in an article in the Beche-demer Information Bulletin “Towards a CITES listing of teatfish” (Di Simone et al. 2019), the proposal to include three Holothuriidae (teatfish) species – Holothuria fuscogilva, H. nobilis and H. whitmaei) in Appendix II was submitted by the European Union (EU) and co-sponsored by the United States of America (USA), Seychelles, Kenya and Senegal. Committee I of the conference debated the proposal on 25 August, and it was accepted by secret ballot, with 108 Parties in favour and 30 against. After 17 years of discussions (Bruckner 2006; Robin des Bois 2019), three sea cucumber species were, for the first time ever, listed in CITES Appendix II on 28 August 2019 in plenary session.