‘People collect spiders like Pokemon’: why the illegal tarantula trade is booming

However, keeping tarantulas as pets does not appear to be driving the trade market. Some 43% of tarantula species are traded as souvenirs (for mounting and framing post-mortem), as research instruments, and for medicine, according to a study. The souvenir market seems to be growing the fastest.

Poaching of wild animals grew exponentially in the 1970s and 1980s; around the same time, keeping tarantulas as pets became popular. As demand escalated, so did it captive breeding and the legal trade market. However, Peeler believes the illegal tarantula market grew faster because doing everything above water takes time and money and involves obtaining permits. And it skyrocketed with the advent of the Internet; suddenly, it was much easier for traders and tarantula fans to find each other.

There are seemingly endless ways to transport the tiny invertebrates, making regulating the trade market a complex and potentially unsustainable endeavor. In 2010 a German man sent hundreds of baby tarantulas wrapped in multicolored straws via the United States Postal Service. In December 2021, Colombian authorities arrived at El Dorado Airport two people arrested an attempt to smuggle more than 230 tarantulas into Europe in one suitcase.

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Hughes says the other reason why regulating the tarantula trade is challenging is the lack of existing data (ecology, distribution and population trends) on the animals. This also makes it difficult to assess the full impact of the illegal trade on species. At least there are 1,000 known species of tarantula in today’s world, and many others have yet to be cataloged or have been incorrectly cataloged by dealers.

Only species listed below Quotes (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) are maintained, “but these represent only a very small fraction of tarantula species in trade,” says Carol Fukushima, a tarantula taxonomist and researcher at Bison laboratory at the University of Turku in Finland. “Many are sold and transported without a license or registration through methods such as ‘brownboxing’, where specimens are illegally shipped, mislabeled or transported as non-wild animals to avoid detection,” she says.

Fukushima says there are also likely discrepancies in the naming and identification of species in the illegal market, further clouding the true impact of the trade. “See the case of Chilobrachys natanicharumTraded for years as ‘Electric Blue Tarantula’, but not scientifically described until 2023,” she explains.