Billions of wild animals have been imported to the US in the last two decades

Nearly 3 billion plants and animals have been imported into the United States over the past 20 years, most of which are collected from the wild.

“The numbers are really huge,” he says Alice Hughes at the University of Hong Kong. She says this estimate is probably still insufficient because it only includes legal trade and there is no comprehensive way to track the total amount of wildlife trade around the world. “We’ve just scratched the surface,” she says.