Growing demand for pet spiders and scorpions putting rare species at risk, warn scientists
- More than 70 per cent of the animals available for sale have been sourced from the wild and include previously unknown species
- China is the largest supplier of spiders or scorpions to the US market and more than 40 per cent of them come from the wild – a figure below the global average
Rare spiders and scorpions are being put at risk by a growing global trade driven by the demand for exotic pets, including species so rare that scientists were previously unaware of them, a team of international researchers has warned.
They said that at least 70 per cent of spiders and scorpions being sold as pets, for medicine or food have been sourced from the wild. The researchers detected more than 1,200 species available for sale in a generally legal trade.
They found that the three largest commercial sources for spiders and scorpions on sale in the US market – a major centre for the trade – were China, which has more species of spiders, 5,100, than anywhere else in the world, Ghana and Chile.
China exported more animals – 1.2 million – to the US than any other country, 40 per cent of which were sourced from the wild. Although Ghana and Chile exported fewer in total 98.8 per cent and 90 per cent of these respectively came from the wild.
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“Efforts are needed to monitor what is in trade, to verify identities, and trace origins of specimens … to prevent potentially unsustainable trade and species extinction arising from trade without the data or regulations needed to ensure sustainability,” the team wrote in an article published in the peer-reviewed journal Communications Biology on Thursday.