Irregular Company

Raven Biskup examines how spider collectors help conserve threatened and endangered spiders globally.

By Raven Biskup

When I was a little kid, I was obsessed with bugs. I spent much of my free time in the summer searching my backyard for tiny creatures like pill bugs and grasshoppers. However, I was particularly interested in spiders. I would stab holes in empty salad boxes to use as makeshift enclosures for jumping spiders I found. I caught orb-weaver spiders with my bare hands and released them in my room so they would construct webs in the corners.

Much to my disappointment, I only found common, relatively small spiders in my neighborhood. I dreamed of seeing all the amazing spiders I read about in library books and nature field guides, which led to begging my parents to let me have what I considered the ultimate spider—a tarantula. Understandably, my arachnophobic dad was not fond of the idea of a spider the size of a small rodent living in our house, so I eventually stopped asking.

As I grew up, I became less fixated with arachnids, although I still retained my interest. While being stuck at home for quarantine due to the coronavirus pandemic, I craved a new hobby. I remembered my fascination with massive spiders, and unlike when I was in elementary school I now had my own income. I was once again engrossed by tarantulas, spending hours researching how to care for them, and where I could get one. In October of 2020, I finally fulfilled my childhood dream of owning a tarantula, and I affectionately named my new friend “Charlie.”

I was soon tempted to get more. While browsing the display of tarantulas at a local pet shop, a small vial, labeled “Poecilotheria metallica,” caught my eye. The price for this tiny spider ($125) seemed egregious, so I typed the name into Google to see why it was so expensive. I was stunned—the tarantula was a vibrant shade of blue, and it had rings on the joints of its legs colored gold and white. The top of its body was adorned with an intricate geometric pattern, the whole spider covered in silvery hairs.

I decided that the stunning tarantula was worth buying. I wanted to learn more about it, so I later did a little research. To my surprise, it was categorized as “critically endangered.” It almost felt wrong to keep such an animal in my room for personal enjoyment. I found that Poecilotheria metallica, commonly known as the Gooty Sapphire Ornamental Tarantula, wasn’t the only endangered tarantula species commonly kept in captivity. And as might be expected, the international trade of captive tarantulas is controversial and could affect the populations of these species.

While none have the vivid blue coloration of P. metallica, the rest of the genus Poecilotheria are similarly captivating and desirable—and endangered. The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List denotes one Poecilotheria species as vulnerable, three as endangered, and two as critically endangered, and most species of this genus haven’t even been evaluated yet.

Naturally, I worried that these populations may have been decimated by exotic pet enthusiasts and that I had unknowingly contributed to a massive problem. I was somewhat relieved to learn that the exotic pet store down the street was not the bane of these species, but rather the deforestation and destruction of their natural habitats in India and Sri Lanka. While still dismaying, at least it was unrelated to the pet trade. Although, as these spiders take years to become fully grown, it doesn’t seem unlikely that a few people looking to make some easy money by selling wild-caught Poecilotheria could exacerbate an already dire situation.

To get a better understanding of how owning these spiders could affect their native populations, I spoke with Richard Stewart, who has kept tarantulas for over 20 years. His YouTube channel, the Tarantula Collective, has over 72,000 subscribers. Many people are afraid of spiders in general, or at least have an aversion towards them, something that Stewart once related to. “I was pretty terrified of spiders,” he says, “but I got my first tarantula to, kind of, overcome that fear. And the more I learned about them, the more fascinating they became to me, and also with that knowledge, the fear started to slip away.”

This innate fear is so common, albeit there is no clear reason as to why. Nonetheless, this makes even the mildest of arachnophobes reluctant to care about the wellbeing of arachnids. “I don’t think it’d be too far off the mark to say that most people’s initial reaction when they see a tarantula or a spider is to kill it,” says Stewart.

The reason why those pesky house spiders aren’t extinct yet (probably to the dismay of many) can be explained with fancy Latin words, called taxonomy. Organisms are grouped into domains, kingdoms, phyla, and so on. Spiders make up the class Araneae, and are divided into two suborders: Araneomorphae and Mygalomorphae.

The majority of spiders in the world, such as the plethora of species you’ll find in your house, are araneomorphs, while tarantulas are mygalomorphs. The fast life cycle of the araneomorphae, as well as the large amounts of eggs they produce, allows them to easily repopulate and spread.

“They’re pretty abundant… it’s hard to conceive of a situation where most people would over-collect a population of these spiders,” says Dr. Linda Rayor of Cornell University’s department of entomology, the world’s top specialist on huntsman spider behavior. “These guys have short lives,” she explains. “Largely, these guys are living a year, year, and a half.”

“Mygalomorphs are living somewhere between nine and 40 years, 25 years commonly,” says Dr. Rayor. This is a shockingly long lifespan for a bug. An araneomorph could mate, lay eggs, and die before a mygalomorph even reaches sexual maturity. Additionally, unless the tarantulas are males seeking a mate, they have no reason to travel any significant distance.

“Many of them have very, very localized populations,” says Dr. Rayor. This makes tarantulas extremely vulnerable to human impact; their low reproductive rates and centralized populations make it very easy to permanently damage their endemic populations. With new species of tarantulas being regularly discovered, collected, and being available for sale only a year or two later, this is especially pertinent. “You can wipe out an entire population, because they’re all in the same small area,” Dr. Rayor laments.

Poecilotheria metallica is an extreme example of this, with their population confined to a forest in India that’s too small to even be visible on a map of Asia. Logging and forest fires have decimated this spider’s already sparse endemic population, so it almost seems heinous to keep a species spiraling towards extinction in a glass box for one’s personal enjoyment. However, the world’s collective fear towards creepy crawlies often leads to a misunderstanding of them.

It seems redundant to mention, but spiders differ from vertebrates—people just don’t usually know the extent of how unique these creatures are. This also means that effective conservation efforts for tarantulas look quite different.

Unlike many textbook endangered species, amateur hobbyists collecting tarantulas could actually help their conservation. While not reproducing nearly as prolifically as araneomorphs, tarantulas are still fairly easy to breed. The captive population of P. metallica dwarfs the population of wild ones, which protects the native spiders in their natural habitat. Finding someone online who has somehow managed to find one of these elusive spiders in India, and is willing to ship it illegally across the planet, which puts the tarantula at a high risk of dying, is far more difficult and expensive than just buying a legally captive bred specimen. “We are not getting a Tiger King-like situation with tarantulas,” says Dr. Rayor. “Captive breeding should be supported.”

There are many species of tarantulas that have legal protections, which can help reduce the amount of poaching. Unfortunately, these same regulations also tend to make a thriving captive population difficult to create. In 2018, the United States Department of Fish and Wildlife listed five Poecilotheria species from Sri Lanka (not including P. metallica) as endangered under the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (the ESA). The spiders’ inclusion to the ESA does protect them, by requiring permits for imports and outlawing ownership of illegally collected specimens from any country. However, by assigning them this designation, it also makes it illegal to sell any listed species across state lines. Ownership, breeding, and trade from within the same state are still legal.

When hobbyists questioned why there were so many restrictions for the captive-bred specimens, when the act is supposed to protect the wild population, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stated, “the Act does not allow for captivebred specimens of these listed species to be assigned separate legal status from their wild counterparts.” Even though invertebrates behave and reproduce differently than vertebrates, they are both regulated in the same way under the ESA. “The idea is good,” says Dr. Rayor. “We don’t want wild animals coming in. You don’t want habitat destruction... but because they’re successfully being bred [in captivity], regulations that we can’t sell across state lines of Poecilotheria that are captive bred are crazy, it’s misguided.”

For the most part, tarantula hobbyists only keep spiders because they truly appreciate them, so they tend to be very conscious of their conservation. Stewart described his personal experience with the self-accountability in the hobby: “When I first got into tarantulas, I didn’t care how I got it—or it’s not that I didn’t care, I just didn’t know about their threatened and endangered status. But while keeping them and learning about them… you also learn a whole lot about the different factors that are threatening them in the wild. And that really kind of inspires a desire to get involved in conservation… You can appreciate them a whole lot because you have them right in front of you in an enclosure, but you also learn how integral they are to the ecosystem, and how important it is that they don’t go extinct.”

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The conservation effort of tarantulas is probably impeded by a lack of awareness more than anything else. With large conservation movements predominantly focused towards more popular animals, spiders are overlooked. “That’s something that we focus a lot on, on my podcast [the Exotic Pet Collective],” says Stewart. “It’s really easy to raise money and generate concern to save polar bears, whales, or anything that’s large and cute. When it comes to arthropods, especially tarantulas… it’s really hard to get people motivated, or interested, or concerned about the decimation of their populations and their environments.”

The irony of this is that arthropods, such as spiders, play a vital role in their ecosystem. Without spiders, insect populations would get widely out of control, which in turn could damage the local environment, and have many adverse effects for all species. “It has this domino effect,” says Stewart, “kind of like a tower of Jenga. You pull out something on the bottom, everything else comes crashing down on top of it.”

The effort for conservation of tarantulas is almost entirely driven by tarantula hobbyists, and desperately needs more recognition. The IUCN Red List denotes “formal education” and “awareness & communications” as two needed conservation actions for P. metallica—while also using data from 2008 (their most recent assessment).

Fortunately, the tarantula community has grown quite rapidly, with people such as Stewart and Dr. Rayor acknowledging the importance of awareness and appreciation of creatures that so many people would be thrilled to never see again. “I think it’s incredibly worthwhile to share that spiders are not dangerous, spiders are appealing, spiders are interesting,” says Dr. Rayor. “And that having captive animals in a situation where you can show just the sheer diversity and the beauty and the charm of spiders, or other invertebrates, is hugely worthwhile… I am increasingly thinking about it being my personal responsibility to breed them, so that there are large captive populations so people can own them and see how appealing they are.”

Stewart owned a P. Metallica before they were classified as critically endangered, and like me, he also initially felt guilty. “It was like this realization when that information came out, that I have critically endangered specimens in my basement,” he recalls, “it kind of creeped me out… I actually felt bad about it.” While it was detrimental for endangered species of spiders to be initially collected from the wild, the resulting captive populations have created more awareness than any outreach program could have. “If it wasn’t for the tarantula hobby, and for falling in love with tarantulas in general, I would not be aware that that was ever even an issue,” says Stewart.

In my personal experience, the guilt I felt quickly dissipated when I immersed myself in the tarantula community, and realized the people keeping them, even the critically endangered species, are learning about and gaining a deep appreciation for an aspect of nature that is generally considered repulsive.

With any traces of guilt dissolved, I now think of my endangered spiders not as a regret, but as an opportunity— that maybe my specimens can help people understand tarantulas a little more. Even if people still remain perturbed by them, they can still gain some appreciation for these extraordinary octopedal beasts.

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