© 2025 KUNR
Illustration of rolling hills with occasional trees and a radio tower.
Serving Northern Nevada and the Eastern Sierra
Donate
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
The threat of catastrophic funding cuts for public media looms, and while we don’t know what the U.S. Senate will do, we do know this: We need your help protecting this vital service.
Learn what you can do to support KUNR and public media today ➡️

Unregulated sale of scorpions and spiders stings wild populations

Published June 2, 2022 at 9:52 AM PDT
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.