re: Trade of endangered plants

Marj Boyer (Marj_Boyer@ncdamail.agr.state.nc.us)
Tue, 18 Jun 96 15:03:35 EST

Greetings to all from The Enforcer in North Carolina. I just caught
up with several days' worth of the series that started with Barry M-R
trying to sell endangered Sarracenias.

I know all the regulatory stuff is confusing. It might help to look at
the regulations this way:

1. When crossing national borders, CITES applies
2. Within the U.S., federal laws apply
3. Within a state, state laws apply

There was a mention of states maybe adding their own stuff to "the"
endangered species list. There's more than one endangered species list:

1. Internationally, the CITES Appendix I & Appendix II lists
2. The federal list: Plants listed as endangered or threatened under
the Endangered Species Act
3. Individual state lists. Most states have their own rare-plant law
and their own list which will include all federally-listed species in
the state plus other plants rare in that particular state. NC, for
instance, has 116 plant species listed as endangered or threatened
under the NC Plant Protection and Conservation Act, including 26
federally listed species found in NC (plus two other legally protected
plants, ginseng & Venus flytrap, not endangered or threatened but
needing protection).

So as an NC official I stop my big black hovering armed helicopter at
the state line (gosh darn it!). But inside NC, cp growers are
supposed to have our state permit not only to hold the federally-
listed Sarracenias oreophila & jonesii, but also the state-listed-as-
threatened Utricularia olivacea, which has no federal status.

I'm curious. Do any of you, or any cp'ers you know of, keep any
Utricularia olivacea in your live collections? Does anyone care about
it? I find to my chagrin that I didn't mention the species in the Web
page on NC regulation of cp's. An easily overlooked plant in more ways
than one.

Marj Boyer
Plant Conservation Program
NC Dept. of Agriculture (919) 733-3610