Figure 1.
High-value tropical beche-de-mer on sale in jars in Hong Kong.
Upper-left: H. lessoni; lower-right: H. fuscogilva; lower-centre: H. scabra. Photo: S.W. Purcell.
Figure 2.
Average export prices of large-sized beche-de-mer from New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and Kiribati.
Bars without error bars denote singular datum. Missing bars denote that the species was not reported as being exported at the time of the interviews.
Figure 3.
Map of study countries and the destinations of their exports of beche-de-mer.
Thicknesses of arrows are scaled to the proportion of exporters exporting product to those destinations.
Table 1.
Market value and size descriptors of beche-de-mer species in Chinese stores.
Figure 4.
Dried sea cucumber specimen length vs price for six species of beche-de-mer.
The scatter plots and curves of best fit by AIC selection are for the species for which there were sufficient data from at least four replicate lots and for which significant relationships were found. All data are average lengths of individual specimens from lots at the same unit price in stores. Dark red dots are data from Hong Kong; green dots are data from Guangzhou.
Table 2.
GLM analysis final model of effects of species, specimen length and physical damage to beche-de-mer on the (Ln-transformed) price per kg of beche-de-mer in Chinese stores.