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Unregulated sale of scorpions and spiders stings wild populations

An Emperor scorpion attempts to escape a bowl. (Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images)
An Emperor scorpion attempts to escape a bowl. (Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images)

The internet is crawling with black-market sales of exotic scorpions and spiders. More than 12,000 species of arachnids are bought and sold online. The vast majority of the sales are unmonitored, according to a new report in Communications Biology.

Here & Now‘s Peter O’Dowd speaks with University of Hong Kong professor Alice Hughes, one of the authors of the study.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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