Insects and spiders on the web: Monitoring and mitigating online exploitation of species and services

Abstract

Exploitation of insects and spiders through commercialization represents a serious threat to rare species and to common species that provide valuable ecological services. The speed, scope, and anonymity, of online commerce places full monitoring and managing of exploitation beyond the resources available to regulatory agencies. To assess the level of online commerce of insect and spider species and services and to test the feasibility of focused searches by student-specialists to generate “leads” for regulatory agencies to pursue, a group of entomology students lead by entomologists and wildlife biologists performed a directed search for sales of insect and spider species listed on CITES Appendices, the IUCN Red List, and the U.S. Endangered Species List, and species that provide services. Focused searches by student-specialists proved effective, locating sales of 79 listed species across all lists. The proportion of listed species discovered for sale varied from 2% to 55% across protected lists and the sale prices of species varied from 2 to 3850 USD. The number of listed species for sale also varied across platforms with less than 6 found on either Amazon or Alibaba and more than 30 found on Etsy and Ebay. In contrast to the listed species, numbers of insects and spiders sold to provide services can range in the billions of individuals and total sales can range in the millions USD. While all species for this purpose do provide a service, they each present unique risks to other species in their genera, guild, and to the larger ecological community, in some cases threatening ecological functions. To effectively monitor the impact of invertebrate service species, we propose incorporating these “livestock” into the existing regulatory framework used for vertebrates.