Scientists Uncover a Shady Web of Online Spider Sales

[(David P.)]

Scientists Uncover a Shady Web of Online Spider Sales
By Emily Anthes, May 19, 2022, NY Times

“They don’t bark, they don’t need to go for walks — you can
set up a simple arachnid in a 5-gallon tank on your shelf,”
said Ernest Cooper, an independent wildlife-trade expert in
Canada. “They have fascinating behaviors. Some have bright
colors.” To learn more about the scale of the global arachnid
trade, the authors of the new paper used a handful of search
terms — “spider,” “scorpion,” “arachnid” — in nine languages
to identify websites that might be selling the animals. After
eliminating shops selling spider excavators or Spider-Man
collectibles, they scraped the data from the remaining sites
to generate a list of arachnid species for sale online. (They
also used the Internet Archive to find historical sales listings
dating back to 2002.)

Across these sites, the study found a total of 1,248 arachnid
species currently or previously for sale. The list included
some showstoppers, such as the enormous Asian forest scorpion
and striped Costa Rican zebra tarantula. But it also had some
surprises, like Daddy longlegs spiders, common denizens of
basements across America. “They are literally balls with legs
— small balls with legs,” said Caroline Fukushima, a postdoctoral
researcher at the Finnish Museum of Natural History and an author
of the paper. “You cannot impress someone with that.”

Compared with the expansive online listings, a U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service trade database included only 267 arachnid
species, the scientists found. The Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES,
which regulates the international trade of a variety of plant
and animal species, had just 30 species in its trade database.
(Individual nations may have their own regulations, and American
authorities do sometimes intercept arachnids that arrive without
the proper paperwork. Dr. Danielson-Francois was once the recipient
of a box full of seized emperor scorpions that officials were
seeking to unload.)

The online marketplace moves fast, with new arachnid species
appearing in shops not long after they are first described by
scientists. Nearly 200 of the species that have been discovered
since 2000 are already being traded; dozens were available within
a year or two of first being described, the researchers found.
“That suggests that people are going out to the field, and
they’re finding something new and just collecting the heck out
of it and then putting it up online for sale,” Dr. Danielson-
Francois said. Collectors may also be buying species that aren’t
yet known to science. Dr. Hughes and her colleagues identified
about 100 kinds of arachnids in trade that were consistently
described as variants of known species, such as the “Vietnam blue
tarantula.” (“Not for beginners,” the site Reptile Rapture cautions.
“Very Defensive.”) But in many cases, these “variants” may actually
be distinct new species, the scientists said.

In a separate analysis of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife records, the
researchers found that about two-thirds of individual arachnids
had been caught in the wild. Many were shipped from countries
where they are not known to be native, suggesting that they may
have been laundered across national borders, Dr. Hughes said.
The study has limitations. It is not an exhaustive inventory of
every arachnid species available for purchase, and not all online
listings may translate into actual sales, outside experts cautioned.
And the ecological effects of this trade are difficult to determine,
in part because so little is known about arachnids. “We often don’t
really fully understand the distributions of many of these species,
let alone specifically where they occur, what they need to survive,”
said Sarina Jepsen, who directs the endangered species program at
the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, an international
nonprofit.

But many arachnid species appear to be confined to small geographic
regions; some, like tarantulas, mature slowly and have long life
spans. “You can think of them as the rhinoceros or the panda of the
arachnid world,” Dr. Danielson-Francois said. “It’s possible for
local populations to go extinct when they’re poached.” In another
recent study, researchers at Cornell University found multiple
species of endangered tarantulas being sold online. Protecting
arachnids will require more of everything, experts said: more
regulation, more research on arachnid ecology and more data on
precisely which species are being imported to and exported from
specific countries — and in what quantities.

“Are there species that we should be particularly concerned about?”
Dr. Cooper said. “Are there species that are hammered in large
numbers every year? Every species is not equivalent.” In the
meantime, experts encouraged arachnid enthusiasts to do their
homework before acquiring new organisms, making sure they know
where the animals come from and whether they were captive-bred
or wild-caught. “We have to, as final consumers, think about
what is our role in helping conservation of these animals that
we love so much,” Dr. Fukushima said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/science/spiders-tarantulas-arachnids-trade.html