Untangling the web: dynamics of Australia's online terrestrial invertebrate trade

Abstract

The trade and keeping of exotic pets has serious implications for both biosecurity and biodiversity conservation. In Australia, the online trade of live invertebrates is an understudied and unregulated issue, with almost non‐existent monitoring. It is uncertain what species are being traded, whether they are being identified correctly, and how they are being sourced (i.e., captive bred or wild harvested, native, or alien). Consequently, potential invasion risks and conservation concerns remain unknown. Here, we explored the online trade of terrestrial invertebrates in Australia across a range of publicly available e‐commerce platforms. We detected 264 species of invertebrate traded, from 71 families and 168 genera over 12 months. The native Extatosoma tiaratum (giant prickly stick insect) was the most traded species, while the most popular families were Phasmatidae (stick insects), Formicidae (ants) and Theraphosidae (tarantulas). Three species are known to be invasive in Australia, while 87% of species traded were native. The conservation status of almost of the species (92%) listed in the invertebrate trade has not been evaluated. Exploring socio‐demographic relationships, we found that human population density was positively correlated with the location of invertebrate sellers. Further, we found the classifieds website had lower prices in contrast to traditional online pet‐stores (median of c. A$7 less). Finally, we did not observe a saturation in the number of species traded in our one‐year study, exemplifying the need for large scale monitoring and risk assessments for Australia's online terrestrial invertebrate trade. We recommend continued surveillance of live invertebrate trade on e‐commerce sites. Substantial changes to legislation and monitoring methods are required at a national level to control the vast number of invertebrates traded across the country, and to minimise the future risks of the invertebrate trade.

Two new species of burrowing scorpions (Urodacidae: Urodacus) from the Pilbara region of Western Australia with identical external morphology†

“…Despite the fossorial ecology of most Urodacus species, the group is well known to naturalists and very popular in the pet trade, where three species in the genus featured in the top 10 most popular invertebrate species in online pet stores (Lassaline et al . 2023).…”

“…Despite the fossorial ecology of most Urodacus species, the group is well known to naturalists and very popular in the pet trade, where three species in the genus featured in the top 10 most popular invertebrate species in online pet stores (Lassaline et al 2023). The potential conservation impacts of the pet trade via the harvest of live animals is concerning, especially when one of the most traded species, U. yaschenkoi, has recently been found to represent a species complex (Luna-Ramirez et al 2017b).…”

Another ghost of Gondwana—Progradungula barringtonensis Michalik & Smith, sp. nov., a new species of the relict spider genus Progradungula (Araneae: Gradungulidae) from a temperate rainforest in eastern Australia

“…Specimens were collected in March 2016 and November 2019 from Nothofagus forest in Barrington Tops National Park (NSW, Australia), which although unusually dry, was not affected by Australia's ‘Black Summer’ fires of 2019–2020 (Abram et al 2021). Due to conservation concerns and the potential for illegal wildlife trade impacting the populations, we refrain from providing precise locality data (Lassaline et al 2023; Marshall et al 2022).…”

Developing Loop Mediated Isothermal Amplification (LAMP) assays for rapid, presumptive DNA detection of an invasive reptile (Boa constrictor)

“…Wildlife trade is a prominent driver of extinction (Scheffers et al 2019;Hinsley et al 2023) that affects species from across the tree of life (Fukushima et al 2020), including terrestrial (Morton et al 2021) and aquatic vertebrates (Ripple et al 2019), invertebrates (Purcell et al 2014;Lassaline et al 2023), plants (Margulies et al 2019), and fungi (Sills et al 2021). The scale of wildlife trade is increasing in the face of ongoing globalisation, with vertebrate trade involving over a quarter of all terrestrial species (Scheffers et al 2019).…”