Did this scientist go too far trying to save Ecuador’s wildlife?
From ScienceMag:
In late 2024, philanthropists interested in wildlife conservation got an intriguing offer: Donate to a new fund that would provide small grants to young researchers seeking to discover new kinds of tropical animals, and you could help name the new species. The Arteaga Species Discovery Fund was the brainchild of Alejandro Arteaga, a herpetologist in Ecuador eager to boost tropical conservation by accelerating efforts to document biodiversity. “We are unlikely to be effective towards saving species if we remain unaware they exist,” Arteaga wrote on a website promoting the fund.
Involving patrons in naming scientific discoveries wasn’t new; scientists have long honored financial supporters by attaching their names to newly described plants, animals, and even stars, or allowing donors to select a name. Arteaga himself had named new species after prominent figures who supported his work, including actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Islamic leader Shah Rahim al-Hussaini (also known as Aga Khan V). But Arteaga’s fundraising pitch sparked a backlash from other herpetologists. Some had long been critical of such pay-to-play schemes, fearing they encourage researchers to sidestep scientific rigor in a bid to publish new discoveries that would attract attention and donations. Others wondered whether potential donors were aware of Arteaga’s decidedly mixed reputation.
Over the past decade, the charismatic 34-year-old researcher has become a prominent figure in South American herpetology, known for publishing descriptions of dozens of new species of snakes, lizards, and frogs as well as some of Ecuador’s most important herpetology guidebooks, illustrated with his vivid photographs. He’s won prestigious awards and attracted global headlines, as well as tens of thousands of social media followers. And he’s devoted himself to securing funding to expand conservation areas, including Ecuador’s Arlequin and Pitala ecological preserves.
But Arteaga has also faced allegations of research misconduct, been barred from entering some of Ecuador’s leading museum collections and preserves, and alienated many once-supportive professors and colleagues. Arteaga’s detractors also assert that, by publishing new species descriptions of contested accuracy, he has artificially inflated species counts—potentially causing scarce conservation funding to be wasted on organisms in little need of help and even complicating efforts to provide lifesaving antidotes to venomous snake bites.
The controversy swirling around Arteaga has highlighted tensions facing tropical herpetology, a poorly financed field that attracts both sober scientific interest and legions of enthusiastic collectors, photographers, and wildlife fans. The temptation to hype discoveries and play to donors can be overwhelming, researchers say. “I know it is difficult to secure funding,” says Jacobo Reyes Velasco, a biologist at the Mexican conservation nonprofit Herp.mx. But Arteaga’s practices “open a very dangerous door [because they] encourage people to describe whatever they can in order to obtain resources.”
Arteaga concedes he’s made mistakes in his zeal to describe and defend nature. But he also suggests his methods are a necessary response to the state of Ecuador’s scientific community, which he describes as stale, rigid, and cronyistic. He also charges it is failing to address an increasingly urgent environmental and scientific crisis in one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. The field of taxonomy “is on the verge of extinction” in South America, he says—just when it is needed most.
Arteaga’s charisma comes across in conversation. During a recent online video interview, he spoke in a low, measured voice as he relaxed on the patio of his wooden house deep in the Ecuadorian forest. His soft gaze and unhurried cadence invited trust. But the atmosphere shifted when questions unsettled him. He weighed each sentence with care, as if testing it before letting it go.
Born in Venezuela, Arteaga spent his early years in Mérida, in the country’s western mountains, where he spent hours exploring the lush cloud forests. The son of a photographer and a painter, he developed an artistic sensibility. At 15, after he got his first camera, conservationists who were friends of the family began to invite him on field expeditions to photograph wildlife. Arteaga’s family later moved to Ecuador where, at 17, he made his first mark in taxonomy by discovering a new species of frog. He brought the specimen to the zoology museum at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador (PUCE), where he would enroll as an undergraduate.
By then, Arteaga says he knew he wanted to become a herpetologist and taxonomist. He was already working to publish the formal description of the frog he had found, which he named Pristimantis bambu after the bamboo forest where it lived. It was deeply satisfying, he says, to add a new organism to the tree of life. “It’s nice to be able to transcend in some way and realize you’ve left a mark, however brief, that stays behind.”
- Alejandro Arteaga
The young researcher’s abilities impressed Omar Torres-Carvajal, PUCE’s curator of herpetology. “I saw in him a talented student with the potential to go far,” he says. But Arteaga’s enthusiasm soon led to a setback. One afternoon in 2011, Torres-Carvajal heard from museum staff that the student had violated a cardinal rule: rifling through specimens in the herpetology collection, Ecuador’s largest, without permission. Arteaga explained he was gathering information for a field guide he hoped to write. But staffers considered the violation so serious—because irreplaceable specimens could be damaged or even lost—that they banned Arteaga from the collection.
The ban “hurt deeply,” Arteaga recalls. Still, he finished his undergraduate degree at PUCE and was able to continue his work on the field guide by winning access to two other important herpetology collections in Ecuador. And in 2013, he published the field guide, The Amphibians and Reptiles of Mindo: Life in the Cloudforest. It features photographs of 48 species found in Ecuador and is now considered a classic in the field.
In retrospect, say researchers who have worked with Arteaga, the museum incident highlighted two traits that have since characterized his career: a relentless drive to share his passion for herpetology—and a penchant for violating scientific norms and cutting ethical corners in the name of building support for conservation. Those traits have repeatedly placed Arteaga at the center of controversy.
In 2020, for example, Arteaga found himself banned from several ecological reserves in Ecuador. Six years earlier, he had co-founded Tropical Herping, an ecotourism company that planned to support conservation by having herpeto-enthusiasts from around the world pay to accompany researchers into the field as they photographed wildlife and searched for new species. The firm thrived after its compelling photos and discoveries began to appear in high-profile outlets such as National Geographic. In addition to supporting a team of photographers, it ran tours across South America as well as in Madagascar and Sri Lanka.
But the firm clashed with the Ecominga Foundation, a nonprofit that manages the ecological reserves. In a December 2020 letter to Tropical Herping, the foundation wrote that it was banning the firm from its properties because its staff had entered reserves without the required authorizations and refused to “work respectfully and cooperatively” with Ecominga’s rangers and scientists.
Even as Tropical Herping dealt with the fallout from the rupture, it became enmeshed in a second controversy after Paul Bertner, a wildlife photographer who had joined an expedition, accused the firm’s staff of mistreating animals. The herpetologists had stored collected animals in plastic bags and placed them under hotel beds for days, he wrote on his website. Bertner also claimed the group torturously posed animals to capture their stunning photographs. The accusations spurred debate about whether some herpetology enthusiasts were using “scientific research as an excuse to be able to get the photography,” Bertner says.
Arteaga acknowledges some of the animals were handled roughly, saying Tropical Herping’s team was young and trying to produce the best possible photographs. And he says the controversy had a constructive outcome, leading to “a radical change” in how he and others in Ecuador’s herpetology community photograph wild specimens—an activity he no longer pursues. But he calls the allegations leveled by Ecominga “a complete absurdity.” He asserts the claims originated with scientists on Ecominga’s board who didn’t want to compete with him in the scholarly race to describe new species, and they became more distorted as they spread. Some held that “I was collaborating with wildlife traffickers,” he says. “Where and how that rumor took root eludes me to this day.”
Ultimately, Arteaga’s work at Tropical Herping made him realize being an ecotourism guide “wasn’t for me,” he says. “You have to be more patient, more extroverted, and have stronger social skills.” In 2023, he moved on to a new project, founding a conservation nonprofit called the Khamai Foundation.
Since then, Arteaga’s public profile has only grown. On social media, photos of him wrangling brightly colored snakes and tramping through forests have gained a growing following. He published his third book—an exhaustive guide to Ecuador’s reptiles—and a string of papers describing some of the 36 new species he says he’s discovered. And in 2024, the prestigious Explorers Club of New York City named him to its list of “50 extraordinary people who are doing remarkable work to promote science.” In an accompanying essay, Arteaga wrote, “I approach each day as if on a mission: to save and discover as many species as possible, all the while inspiring others to embark on a similar journey.”
Arteaga’s journey has left many herpetologists feeling less than inspired. They continue to question his scientific integrity, pointing to three recent episodes.
One day in March 2025, Arteaga delivered jars containing specimens of 183 lizards collected in Ecuador to the Quito Vivarium, a small zoo and research center dedicated to reptiles. Ecuador requires researchers to have collecting and transport permits for such specimens and to house them in a recognized collection. But the vivarium’s director, herpetologist María Elena Barragán, became uneasy because the paperwork accompanying the specimens appeared incomplete. Her concerns grew, she says, after Arteaga deflected questions about the paperwork during a phone call. Fearing the jars had become “a time bomb,” she notified Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment about the issue. To Barragán’s dismay, a ministry official said simply storing the jars put her in legal jeopardy, leaving her feeling anxious and afraid. “I’m falling into a depression,” she told Science in late 2025. (The Environment Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.)
Barragán’s angst was familiar to staff at the zoology museum at the University of San Francisco de Quito (USFQ). In December 2023, they say, similar questions about permits prompted them to deny Arteaga’s request to store five specimens of snakes in the genus Ninia—known as coffee snakes because they are often found on coffee plantations—that he had collected. USFQ museum director Diego Cisneros says specimens that lack permit paperwork are “outside the bounds of legality” and could expose the entire institution to penalties. Just days later, however, Arteaga and a colleague published a paper announcing the discovery of a new Ninia species in Evolutionary Systematics. The paper said USFQ housed one of the specimens the researchers had analyzed. But museum staff found the specimen identification numbers listed in the paper—unique codes that are essentially a requirement of modern taxonomic science—did not match any coffee snake in their collection.
To this day, the supposed specimen has never surfaced, says Cisneros, who informed Ecuador’s Environment Ministry of the discrepancy. The museum filed a second complaint last year when it learned Arteaga said he had collected the lizards he wanted to deposit at the Quito Vivarium under a permit granted in collaboration with USFQ. That couldn’t be true, museum staff wrote, because they ended that collaboration with Arteaga in 2023.
- Juan Guayasamín
- University of San Francisco de Quito
The third episode involves a paper Arteaga published in Evolutionary Systematics in 2024 that received substantial press attention. It describes five new species of eyelash vipers, venomous snakes found in Central and South America that are known for their bright colors and the unusual, lashlike scales above their eyes. The paper nearly doubled the number of known species of eyelash vipers. But it relied heavily on analyses of mitochondrial DNA, a technique many researchers say can’t reliably differentiate closely related species. If similar DNA methods were applied to humans, asserts herpetologist William Lamar of the University of Texas (UT) at Tyler, “our parents and grandparents would be considered new species of Homo sapiens.”
Concerns about the paper’s methods led Jacobo Reyes-Velasco, an independent herpetologist, to reanalyze the data and, in October 2024, he published paper in Herpetozoa questioning the new species. He and others criticized the paper for contributing to a problem known as taxonomic inflation—the splitting of known species into many potentially questionable new species. The problem not only pollutes the scientific literature and creates disorder in national biodiversity inventories, researchers say, but also means scientists must spend additional time and scarce funding on trying to correct the record.
The concerns aren’t just scholarly, the critics add. Taxonomic inflation can lead to the waste of conservation funds by making some species appear to be rare or endangered, when they are actually part of a larger, healthier population. It can even have dire consequences for people bitten by venomous snakes. Medical workers treating snakebite victims must match the antivenom to a specific species, so confusion about which species a snake belongs to could lead to a fatal mismatch.
Given such real-world implications, using disputed methods to identify new species “is disappointing,” says David Hillis, an evolutionary biologist at UT Austin who has criticized what he sees as the overuse of mitochondrial DNA methods to identify new reptile and amphibian species. “People seem to want to call attention to their studies by creating new names.”
Arteaga accepts responsibility for some missteps. He admits he didn’t follow the correct specimen numbering procedures in publishing the coffee snakes paper, for example. And he concedes that the mitochondrial DNA study of eyelash vipers “isn’t perfect, the interpretations aren’t perfect.” But he notes the method is low cost, making it accessible to researchers in a resource-limited country such as Ecuador, and he is pleased it has drawn attention to the snakes.
In the Quito Vivarium case, he blames the dispute on an administrative technicality but regrets having broken ties with Barragán, one of the few curators in Ecuador with whom he still had a good relationship. And he blames long-established herpetologists in Ecuador for many of his troubles, alleging they want to “neutralize” his career. He considers himself a “rebel,” he says, struggling against scientists who are more interested in burnishing their own résumés than describing and saving biodiversity. He says some museum curators he worked with early in his career demanded he add their names to papers describing new species in return for giving him access to their collections, even if they didn’t contribute to the research. “They make excuses [for blocking access] until they are offered co-authorship,” he says.
Tensions between researchers and curators have long existed in Ecuador, say researchers who work there. But “most biologists in Ecuador have good relationships with each other, we’re professionals,” says herpetologist Juan Guayasamín, who became a mentor and close friend of Arteaga over the past decade. But Arteaga, he says, became convinced curators and colleagues were trying to undermine his career.
For his part, Arteaga sees some of his permit issues, such as his failure to provide the full paperwork for some specimens, as a form of resistance. “It’s my way of expressing my disagreement with how things are done,” he says, asserting that such bureaucratic “formalities … hold back the progress of science” and unnecessarily complicate conservation efforts. He hopes his stance will catalyze discussion among herpetologists about what their priorities should be. In the meantime, “I’m not going to bend,” he vows, even if it means facing sanctions from government agencies or academic institutions in Ecuador. “If I’m the first head to fall … so be it.”
And he dismisses concerns that he is contributing to taxonomic inflation. “It might sound trivial,” Arteaga says, but naming a new species “makes it easier for me and for conservation organizations to obtain the resources to protect that species.” Several frog species he has described, for example, were later recognized as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, often an important step toward receiving help.
Arteaga’s actions have not played well with other researchers. Many have distanced themselves, in part because of concerns that Arteaga’s troubles could damage their own careers. “He is isolating himself,” Guayasamín says.
For Guayasamín, who mentored Arteaga for years after he was banned from PUCE and worked with him at Tropical Herping, the 2023 coffee snakes controversy marked a breaking point. Guayasamín says he first developed concerns about Arteaga’s behavior while working with him on a field guide to the Galápagos Islands that was published in 2019. At the time, he blamed any problems on youthful enthusiasm and inexperience. But the coffee snakes episode made him reconsider—and cut ties. “I realized far too late how far he was willing to go,” Guayasamín says. “Alejandro doesn’t understand that doing science means following the basic rules of the game. It’s as if he lives in a parallel reality.”
Arteaga was left with few defenders in late 2024, when he unveiled his plan to auction off naming rights to new species to help finance his nonprofit discovery fund. The fund, launched with Rosalía Arteaga, a former president of Ecuador who is also Arteaga’s great aunt, aims to raise $10 million to support 100 taxonomists under age 35. The researchers would get grants of $2000 to $10,000 to help them discover new species around the world.
Arteaga notes that other organizations in Ecuador, including Ecominga, have benefited from similar fundraisers. Other researchers, however, had deep reservations. Lamar, for example, says although finding funding for taxonomy is a problem, “dropping questionably justified honorifics on the rich and famous is an unwise way to combat this.”
Such objections ultimately persuaded Arteaga to drop the idea. “The Latin American taxonomic community is not ready for this,” he says. Instead, the website now promises that donors will be acknowledged in any resulting publication, press release, or documentary and may have a species named after them “at the sole discretion of the authors.”
Still, he sees the retreat as a missed opportunity. Funding for taxonomy and conservation in Ecuador “is a joke,” he says, and naming auctions could help fill the gap. “It’s that,” he says, “or the species isn’t described and it isn’t saved.”
Some of Arteaga’s former colleagues, however, see such bleak predictions as self-serving—and counterproductive. Research advances through collaboration, and “science and conservation always go hand in hand,” Guayasamín says. But “if one loses credibility, the entire structure falls.”
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