However, keeping tarantulas as pets does not seem to be what is currently driving the commercial market. Some 43% of tarantula species are sold as souvenirs (for mounting and framing post-mortem), as research tools and for medicine, according to a study. The souvenir market seems to be the fastest growing.

Wildlife poaching grew exponentially in the 1970s and 1980s; almost at the same time, keeping tarantulas like pets it became popular. As demand increased, so did Captive breeding and the legal trade market.. However, Peeler believes the illegal tarantula market grew faster because doing everything right takes time and money and involves acquiring permits. And it skyrocketed with the arrival of the Internet; suddenly, it was much easier for traders and tarantula fans to meet.

There are seemingly infinite ways to transport small invertebrates, making regulating the commercial market a complex and potentially unsustainable task. In 2010, a German sent hundreds of baby tarantulas packed in multicolored straws via the US Postal Service. In December 2021, Colombian authorities at El Dorado Airport They arrested two people trying to smuggle more than 230 tarantulas to Europe in a suitcase.

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Hughes says the other reason regulating the tarantula trade is a challenge 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 illegal trade on the species. There is at least 1,000 known species of tarantula in the world today, and many others have not yet been cataloged or have been incorrectly cataloged by dealers.

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

Fukushima says there are also likely to be discrepancies in the naming and identification of species within the illegal market, further clouding the true impact of the trade. “See the case of Chilobrachys natanicharummarketed for years as ‘electric blue tarantula’, but was not scientifically described until 2023,” he explains.