By Syed Zarir Hussain, IANS
Guwahati : Wildlife authorities in Assam have seized an estimated 3,000 endangered Indian bullfrogs from a roadside fuelling speculations about a thriving trade of the amphibians to France, officials Thursday said.
A wildlife official said a police patrol spotted 14 jute bags lying on the side of a highway near the Kaziranga National Park, about 220 km east of Assam’s main city of Guwahati. The seizures were made Aug 29 although authorities disclosed the incident Thursday.
“At least 300 to 400 of the frogs had died of suffocation when we opened the bags,” Dharanidhar Boro, a senior park ranger, told IANS by telephone.
The species was identified as the Indian bullfrog (Hoplobatrachus Tigerinus).
Wildlife officials said the smugglers probably offloaded the bags from a bus or a truck and left it on the roadside, as they feared checking by forest guards and police officials along the park area.
“Forest rangers and police were on alert after we got reports about a big tortoise being smuggled in a vehicle. So we put up roadblocks. Probably the smugglers carrying the frogs got wind of the checking and offloaded the bags,” park director S.N. Buragohain said.
Wildlife officials later released the frogs in a wetland inside the 430 sq km park, home to the world’s largest concentration of the one-horned rhinos with some 1,855 of the worlds estimated 2,700 such herbivorous beasts lumbering around the wilds of Kaziranga.
The Indian bullfrog is the largest Indian frog and they grow up to 15 cm (6 inches) in length. They are coloured yellowish or olive green and have dark irregular markings.
Earlier, this year police at the Guwahati railway station arrested a smuggler with 85 Indian bullfrogs concealed in a container.
“By any standards this is a huge seizure and the consignment in all likelihood was destined for France via Bangladesh where it is considered as a delicacy,” Ashok Kumar, vice chairman of the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), said by telephone from New Delhi.
The WTI official said the frogs are killed in Bangladesh and their legs dismembered and frozen before smuggled to destinations in France.
“The prices of frogs’ legs are never determined, but once frozen it could attract good money,” Kumar said.
“It appears there is organized catching of bullfrogs in Assam.”
The Indian Bullfrog, a species native to southern Asia, was listed as a species in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in 1994 after heavy trade depleted it.
In July 1997, a shipment from Vietnam containing the legs of 450,000 Indian bullfrogs was intercepted in Holland as a CITES violation. The container with the frogs’ legs weighed almost 20 tons and was en route to a wholesaler in Canada.