Some of the world’s leading animal conservation advocates say the world wide web has emerged as one of the biggest threats to endangered wildlife.

From the relative anonymity of an office or lounge room, the modern day poacher can now buy anything from lion cubs to ivory, all with just the click of a mouse.

Ernie Cooper, who works with Traffic in Vancouver, the wildlife trade monitoring agency, says the the black and brown salamander with white spots is just one example of a species that has been driven to near extinction by e-commerce.

“They’re very beautiful. They’re very rare and they tend to command high prices,” he said.

The kaiser’s spotted newt is also prized merchandise in the pet trade.

“There was one company in the Ukraine that was illegally bringing adult kaiser’s spotted newts out of Iran, marketing them on the internet for a rather large amount of money,” Mr Cooper said.

“There’s no way that company could have made those sales or created that trade if it had dealers just locally.”

That one business in the Ukraine claims to have sold more than 200 of the amphibians in a year.

A study by Traffic found it was one of just 10 websites selling the spotted newt, despite estimates that there are only about 1,000 of them left around four streams in the mountains of Iran.

In a vote in Doha at the weekend, representatives from among 175 countries placed the kaiser’s spotted newt on the list of species protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species or CITES.

“What that means is there is no legal, commercial trade in that species,” Mr Cooper said.

“That has effectively shut down the trade in and market for kaiser’s spotted newts.”

Already the countries that have signed up to CITES have voted not to ban the export of atlantic bluefin tuna and not to restrict the trade of red and pink coral.

They will shortly consider competing proposals to either extend the ban on the ivory trade, or to lift some of the restrictions.

But it is the role of the internet in helping traders get around the bans that is a cause for concern among animal conservationists attending the talks.

Paul Todd, a campaign manager for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, says internet sales are difficult to track.

“The transactions kind of come and go and take place before anybody really even knows it, leaving it to the post office to be enforcing this global regime of trade regulation,” he said.

“We tracked over 7,000 individual listings and communiques and advertisements for what they call Appendix 1 species, species that are offered the most protection by the CITES treaty. Over 80 per cent of that, as we kind of expected, was elephant ivory, and most of the rest of it was exotic birds, parrots and macaws.”

Mr Todd says consumers may be unaware they are purchasing illegal products.

“These are only partially illegal species. Once it goes online, the average buyer has no way of knowing for sure if that ivory is truly legal or if that bird wasn’t wild caught,” he said.

Activists acknowledge that problems with jurisdiction make it difficult to catch dodgy traders online, but nevertheless they say existing online supervision is woefully inadequate.

Ernie Cooper says it is time for governments around the world to make the most of the internet’s capabilities.

“It makes it much easier to research these sort of issues. With the kaiser’s spotted newt, we did the entire study from sitting at our computers in Vancouver,” he said.

“That’s the good side. That’s the other power of the internet. So it’s a double-edged sword.”