Skitter

Online retailers are offering rare, endangered bugs

As insects decline globally, there’s a need for regulating their sale online.

Doug Johnson – May 2, 2022 1:00 pm | 42

When a rare species is a product.

Alive or dead, rare or mundane, bugs are weirdly easy to find for sale online. However, in some cases, the insects or spiders sold through the various e-commerce sites, both niche and large-scale, may be of dubious provenance. Some may be bred and reared in sustainable programs. Others might be taken from wild populations that are at risk, according to new research out of Cornell University that was published last week.

“It’s not always clear… if they’re sustainable or not,” John Losey, a Cornell entomology professor and one of the paper’s authors, told Ars. “There are sites out there that are definitely not providing documentation that what they’re selling is being done sustainably.”

According to Losey, some websites will provide no documentation or proof showing that a rare pinned butterfly specimen or pet tarantula was collected in a way that doesn’t pose a risk for wild populations. Some of them could very well have been reared in a sustainable program, Losey said—there’s just no way to tell.

However, the researcher noted that his paper, which surveys the sale of insects and arachnids online, highlights the need for better regulation of these sales. Mandating more information about how the bugs were sourced could help buyers make more informed decisions and limit damage to the environment, he said.

Let me Google that

The research began in the fall of 2019 as part of a class on insect conservation biology. The inspiration for the work came from the news that a dead specimen of a particularly rare bee—Wallace’s Giant Bee—was found for sale on eBay. According to Losey, the students in the class decided that they would scour the Internet to find examples of insect and arachnid species (either pinned or alive specimens) that should be protected.

Throughout that fall semester, the class surveyed online sales while drilling down into specific lists of at-risk species. These lists included the CITES appendices, the IUCN Red List, and the US Endangered Species list. The team also looked at online platforms such as eBay, Etsy, Alibaba, and Amazon. Students examined the different platforms’ regulations regarding the sale of illegal or restricted products. “Definitely, some of the bigger platforms are some of the places where you can find these things for sale,” Losey said. “We didn’t drill down into the dark web. These are things you could just come across with a quick search.”

In 2020, after the semester had ended, Losey brought all that research together into the final paper. Other researchers with expertise in monitoring illegal or restricted online sales—not just of creepy crawlies—also contributed their knowledge to the study, Losey said.

Most of the individual and rare subjects are dead and have been pinned for the sake of display. For example, a Luzon peacock swallowtail—a particularly rare and endangered butterfly—was available from Amazon in a display box for $110. Losey said that there are some cases in which butterfly houses, usually part of a greenhouse, will sell live specimens, but “they tend to be really careful about where they’re getting their specimen from,” Losey said.

He added that most of the sales that are not clear about the provenance and sustainability of their sourcing tend to come pinned and dead. Losey noted that some of the sales of dead bugs could be of antiques. If cared for properly, a pinned specimen could last for decades without deterioration. This could “take pressure away from collecting in the wild,” he said. “It’s possible that you’re buying a specimen, even one on the restricted list, and you’re not harming the species in question.”

The most common in this category of live insects is the sale of tarantulas as pets. Somewhat less common is the sale of live beetles or praying mantis species. Online shoppers can also purchase boxes of “service insects,” such as pollinators for their gardens. Losey noted that in general, living specimens are more common to smaller, more niche platforms compared to Amazon.

FDA approved

In all, the team found that rare specimen insects, rare pets, and service insects are readily available online, with almost no information on potential adverse ecological impacts. Losey said that most of the species the researchers found did not have enough information about their provenance to inform buyers. This is a problem because around 40 percent of all insect species are in decline. The most expensive sale the team found was a rare butterfly specimen called Ornithoptera allottei, which was listed for $3,850 when the researchers performed their search. Not surprisingly, the rarer the bug, the higher the price tag they came with.

It’s difficult to ensure that the purchase isn’t creating a market or enhancing the market for collecting wild-caught rare species, Losey said. Further, collecting wild specimens or pets can often result in damage to the environment. In some cases, this practice can involve going out into a species’ habitat, tromping around, collecting as many bugs as possible, and simply killing the catches that won’t fetch a good enough price, he said. “You can have some pretty major impacts that way,” he said.

These negative impacts could be avoided if the consumer is aware of where their purchases are sourced from—regardless of whether the sale is for a rare specimen, a pet, or a huge box of service insects. Sustainably sourced bugs and spiders could also be sold along with information on the species and what challenges they face in the wild. The work noted that most service species aren’t particularly rare. But if the bugs aren’t reared in ideal and clean conditions, they could introduce diseases into an ecosystem. They may also introduce genes that are poorly adapted to a climate, he said.

Losey also suggested the creation of standards was needed. Insects can be labeled with information about whether they were sourced in accordance with standardized rules—something similar to how the USDA certifies some products as organic or gluten-free. “There could be a little symbol for that… if there was some [regulatory] body that would take that on,” he said.

Science Direct, 2022. DOI: 10.1016/j.gecco.2022.e02098 (About DOIs)

Amazon reached out to Ars to inform us that it has removed products highlighted in this paper. The company also noted that its policies prohibit the sales of endangered species, and any third-party sellers that do not follow its guidelines will be “subject to action,” including the potential removal of their account.

Doug Johnson Science Correspondent

Doug Johnson is a Canadian writer, editor, and journalist, who focuses on science, tech and the environment.

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