Endless Thread - The Spider Web

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

With new and exotic species available at the click of a button, the digital age forever changed the multimillion-dollar arachnid industry. What has that meant for spiders? Credits: This episode was written and produced by Dean Russell. Mixing, sound design, and original music by Matt Reed. Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell are the co-hosts. (Henrik Sorensen/Getty Images)

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WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Hello, Ben. Oh, that was creepy. Thank you. That's going to come for you in the night. How do you feel about spiders? Are you cool with them? More cool with them than you are, certainly.

Yeah, that's true. That's true. Although, when I first saw the movie Araknophobia, I don't know if my dad would even remember this, but I remember saying to my dad, like, Dad, are there spiders just everywhere? And he was like, yes, honey, there are. And I just remember having this total meltdown, like, no. Well, we have some bad news for me and for childhood amory. So keep listening as we continue with our October series. Endless dread. Debbie and Scott Scher moved in together in 1994.

They were young in love and living in Brooklyn. And as many young couples come to find out, one partner's interest will often rub off on the other, even when it's weird. Like this one time, that same year, they were at the New York Renaissance. Fair, and Scott saw something he thought was pretty cool. We were walking around, and there was a vendor there that had a few of them, all different kinds. Scott had never owned one of these things before, but once he saw him, he was hooked. He was reaching for his coin of the realm.

We kept passing this booth and kept passing this booth. And every time we passed the booth, I would turn to Debbie and go, we need to get one. Debbie was not into it. I thought he was joking. Every time we walked around, I'm like, yeah, yeah, okay. And I kept pulling him away from the booth. I'm like, no, absolutely not. We will not be having that in our house.

No way. But then? He just kept pointing and like, look how fuzzy. Look at the pretty colors. Look, look, look. And then I was like, fine, whatever. If it would just shut you up, fine. No problem.

Get it. I just didn't want to hear it anymore. So I caved. Did you name the spider? It was hairy. Okay. Yes, of course. Two large fangs, eight hirsuit legs, body the size of your palm.

Harry was a typical pinkish-brownish tarantula called a Chilean rose hair, the kind you can get in any pet store, the kind that is my personal living nightmare. Scott, however, was enthralled. You never know when it's going to start moving. You never know what's going to kind of set it off, so to speak, whether you're going to find it on the top of the tank one day or, you know, if it escapes, climbing on your wall somewhere. Well, you make sure they don't escape.

Can you take the questions? They brought Harry home in a pink pet pal container, put her in a computer room and shut the door. The seller told them to just give her crickets and water once in a while. That was basically the extent of our torrential care knowledge. Once in a while. Yep. Any schooled spider hobbyist will tell you this is the equipment. of like adopting a dog and being told, eh, you'll figure it out.

Debbie says she knew very little about tarantulas. I remember one time I panicked because if you saw the movie Gremlins, you know that when you give them water, they multiply. And I saw two in the container. And I started screaming and cursing and saying, I told you you can only have one. Why are there too in there? You snuck. Scott ran into the room and he was like, oh, Harry is just molten.

I'm like, what the hell does that mean? Yeah, you and me both, Debbie. It meant Harry was shedding her skin. You know, just normal tarantula stuff. That was one of the most horrifying and exciting and exhilarating moments when, you know, I think that was the initial turning point for me. This was the turning point for Debbie from arachnaphob to arachnophile. Never would have happened to me. Never would have happened. Debbie, why?

Because this was the moment that Debbie realized these creatures were fascinating if you were just willing to get to know them. To do a little bit of research. Nope, I'm going to stay stupid. I prefer to stay stupid and fearful. Today, if you go to a Renaissance fair and see a tarantula stand and for whatever reason are into that, you'd probably pull up Google on your phone and do some light reading before you even bought the thing at the very least. But in this yesteryear of the interwebs, there was no easy access to information online. And that gave Scott and Debbie an idea. We just wanted to create a site where some people, if anyone, got on the internet and looked for information.

information about tarantulas that they might be able to find something that might be helpful to them. And that was why Arakno Bords was born. What they didn't know and what you may not know is that AraknaBords.com would become one of the most used, most well-known websites for spider fans, spider bros, spider collectors of all types. It's pretty much opened a door that most people didn't even know the door existed. That door has likely to be. changed the world of spiders. Some would say for the better, others not so much.

We might say it's a tangle. I'm Dean Rose Hare Russell. I'm Ben Blufang Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Dread. We're crawling into your ears from WBOR. Oh, Dean, no. We're crawling into your ears from WVR, Boston's NPR Egg Sack. Ah, today as part of our month-long series, Endless Dread, we go to one of my least favorite unswept corners of the internet,

the spider web. So, Ben, how excited were you when I pitched this story? Oh. I think it's best if me and spiders don't get together. But why? The thing is, I never understood why you hate spiders. Like so much. It's not rational.

It's not rational. I don't hate them. I just don't want them in my zone, you know? Are you a person who sees a spider in your house and they, like, move them? Or do you kill the spider? That is a great question. And I have really tried to evolve my approach from killing to moving. Mm-hmm.

I even, I will say that there are, there have been spiders in my basement podcast studio that I, I have allowed to coexist with me. Oh. But my natural tendency when I see a spider is to throw a large piece of furniture at it. Well, I, so I'll admit that, like, I am not an arachnophile. But the reason that I came to this story was because about a year ago, TikTok decided to make me one. I ended up keeping this cute little web puppy because I just fell in love with her. Her name is honey.

And she recently molted and boy, did her personality become. even bigger. My sweetheart. One day, the algorithm started giving me videos by people like Tiana the bug lady, who keeps tiny pet jumping spiders. You want to see just how aware jumping spiders are? Watch this. Excuse me.

I mean, it's almost cute. There's a little tiny, cute little spider that fits on the tip of your fingers. And, you know, there's like little captions and the spider. Oh, the spider pooped? Maybe. Yes. But the more I started watching videos like this one with cute tiny jumping spiders, the more I also started to see other spiders. Huge hairy tarantulas.

Yeah, I think tarantula is like, that's where I get off the train. You know what I mean? Immediately. That's where I jump off the moving train towards more spiders. That's fair. If you go down this burrow, though, you will see many, many different types of spiders. You will see Brazilian black tarantulas. Honestly, he's gotten way bigger, so he's so cool.

You will see salmon pink bird eating tarantulas. No, bird eating, no. You'll see hissing tarantulas, fighting tarantulas. Oh, no, no, no, ma'am. Tap dancing male suitor tarantulas. Wow, tarantula talk is real. It's very real. Now, tarantulas are a big part of the exotic pet trade,

and the market is, like, well into the multimillions. And so, like, on a whim, I asked some experts if or how tarantula talk is sort of changing the industry. And they told me that I was actually kind of asking the wrong question. The right question, how has arachnaborts? changed the industry. When I talked to tarantula hobbyists, tarantula scientists, regulators, everyone mentions arachno boards. And as the people behind it, when did you start to realize that this is a website of note? To be honest with you, I still can't believe that it's a website of note. It's still, it's still, like, it's still amazing to us. Yeah. Scott and Debbie,

set up the first iteration of A RACNO boards, a comic sands gem called Arachno Pets, around the year 2000. The year 2000. It was a passion project. They say they've never taken a profit from the site. Even today, the site is not very flashy. Like, picture early Reddit, but for spiders. There's 90,000 members, 200,000 threads, 3 million messages. All right.

That might sound small. compared to a place like Reddit, but these are not casual users, right? These are hardcore spider nerds. What you find on Arakno boards is collective experience, thousands and thousands of years of collective experience. Why was all this collective experience necessary? Well, having a husky versus having a Chihuahua is not really the same as having an Arizona desert blonde and also a tree-dwelling Goody Sapphire. All dogs are technically the same species.

Tarantula species number over 1,000. They act differently, eat different things, they live in different climates, and they have different venom. They murder you in different ways. They murder you for different reasons. All of this is partially why Arakna boards became so popular. People were dying for hyper-detailed advice. Advice in threads like rose hair mating.

Stromatapelma bites. How to pre-kill a superworm without making a mess. Tea elbow acting strange. Curly hair is abound. Maggates. But maybe the biggest effect Arakno boards had, at least from the perspective of anyone with more than two legs, was on trade. Because today, a lot of people collect exotic spiders. Not just like some casual coin collection.

This is full-on obsession like Pokemon style. So in trying to understand how the website Arakna Boards has changed the spider world, we talk to collectors who keep like literally hundreds of spiders in their home. Again, just why? They told us that their collections, in large part, were thanks to Arakna Boards. I went crazy and I understand why people went crazy.

And I started getting all these different species and trying things out. I guess just the idea of being like, let me try, why don't I just try getting this species of spider into my house? Well, obviously you are not Linda Rayer. I study Australian huntsman spiders, which are very cool because they live in large family groups of up to 150. Yes, Linda and I have very different ideas of what cool means. Someone once looked at them and said, wow, these are credit card spiders. They're so flat, but they're big spider.

and lots of people from around the world write me because they're not available in the pet trade. Linda doesn't hobby. She is a behavioral ecologist at Cornell. And president of the American Arachnology Society. She started studying spiders because in grad school, she got the feeling that they were being ignored. I was finding all of these large, totally cool spiders,

and I kept bringing them to the entomology grad students and say, Wow, look at this. What is it? And they said, spiders don't matter. We don't care. They're not important. And that's our show, folks. Spiders are not important. Everybody go home. They are. They are. They are. Take it from Charlotte, the world's most famous spider. Do you realize that if I didn't eat them, bugs would get so numerous they'd destroy the earth? Spiders help keep our ecosystems in check. worldwide spiders are eating more prey, primarily insect prey,

than all the weight of humans on Earth on an annual basis. I'm just saying not all of us take such a positive spin. Just think of the world's second most famous spider. What on their run? Say. Hey man, I think like Ghalam just set up Shilob like... Sheelab just trying to eat? Yeah, she was just eating orcs, having a fine time,

and then, you know, she gets a bad rap, basically. Yeah, she gets a bad rap for a massive cave-dwelling murderous spider. Yes, I agree. Anyway, in the early 2000s, Linda Rayer was teaching a class on spiders. So she decided to get a class tarantula. You know, the first place you look is pet stores. But the problem with pet stores is they traditionally were selling adult male tarantulas that typically die.

within a year. Boring tarantulas, she says. But then she stumbled upon this new URL. How would you describe arachnaborts to someone who has never been to that website? It's wanted ads. It's wanted and selling ads. Arakna boards had set up a classified section where just about anyone could list spiders for sale or trade.

And all of a sudden, Linda was seeing exotic species from far off places for say. I had no idea that tarantulas themselves were so incredibly diverse and beautiful. Like the Socotra Island Blue Baboon. These are beautiful, big burrowing tarantulas that live in big groups and pile on one another kind of like sardines. Or her favorite, the Indian ornamental. They are fairly venomous because if you live in a tree and you grab a lizard, you want to kill it fast so it doesn't drop. With the dawn of Arachnama, boards came a wave of new hobbyists with that obsession to catch them all. Suddenly, you could easily order spiders through the mail in a box or an envelope.

Yes, through the mail. These days, people post unboxing videos on YouTube all the time. They'll even, like, order these things called mystery boxes. As in you don't know what spiders you get until they get there. When it tarantulas, holy moly, last time they sent. then. And that was a lot. Owning a tarantula today is arguably way, way

cooler than in the days where you had to go to a pet store. But this shift in the industry, making unusual spiders available at the click of a button, Linda says that that has also had some negative effects.

Uh, yeah. I think it is good for people to have pet spiders and to look at spiders. and recognize how incredible spiders are. Where I have a great deal of ambivalence is there is so much pressure to collect from the wild for newer animals in the trade. And that's just totally bad business. The sticky, tricky ethics of the spider pet trade in a minute.

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For collectors of anything, there is usually a strong. strong desire for, you know, the new thing. But when you factor in the internet, sites like arachnobords and the fact that spiders are living beings, we wondered, what does that desire mean for the spiders themselves? First, some context. One thing to understand is that people discover new tarantula species all the time. This past August, it was the Persian gold in Iran. A month before that, four new species were described in collaboration.

See, like, this is amazing that new species are always being discovered. And also it really reminds me of the movie Araknophobia, which is like, you know, it just makes so much more sense that there might be like an undiscovered species still in modern day that would, you know, could just be cool or it could potentially be terrifying and shipped on accident from, you know, South America to North America. America and all hell might break loose. Yeah, arachnophobia scientifically accurate. Since arachnoboard started, 200 new species have been uncovered.

When discoveries happen, things can get out of hand. For instance, Linda Rayer at Cornell told us about an incident a few years ago. Back in 2017, two wildlife photographers were traveling through Sarawak, Borneo, when they came across a tarantula with electric blue legs. It's beautiful. And it was what's being called the Bournean neon blue leg tarantula. The photographers were psyched. This thing looked like a new species. They took pictures and posted them online, along with the name of a nearby city. And if you were on the spider web at the time, you would have seen these photos because the color is utterly captivating.

That urge for the new thing kicked in for a lot of people. Hobbyists wanted this blue leg. That, however, was impossible. None of them were on the market. But here's the thing. Sarawak is a small place. Tarantula sellers from Poland, the UK, Germany, and likely locally took note. So?

Literally within weeks of him publishing this picture online, the population was collected. it out almost immediately. Collected out, as in tarantula poachers swept into the Bornean forest, bagged the bugs, and smuggled them out without permits. That's a job that you will never get me to do. Bug bagger. You could do this by something called brown boxing.

Put them in the mail and just don't tell customs that the box has spiders in it. You know, easy peasy. And not long after, the blue leg went up for sale online. 300 bucks a pop. Allow me to ask a question I absolutely know the answer to. But why, pray tell, are wild caught tarantulas a bad thing? Well, if you read Charlotte's web, you may recall that Charlotte, the barn spider, lays hundreds of eggs. Many spiders do, including tarantulas.

But unlike other spiders, tarantulas lay eggs infrequently. So if half a species disappears overnight, they might not bounce back quickly. Also, when the eggs hatch, most die. The rest tend to stay very close to home, so an entire species could live within a 50-mile radius or even a 5-mile radius. In practical terms, what that means is if collectors come in, they can literally wipe out a population in one spot very, very easily. Wild-caught spiders aren't great for hobbyists either because they are more likely to carry pathogens or pests. into their healthy collections. So we know collecting from the wild is not good.

What we don't know is how many tarantulas on the online market are wild caught. In fact, we don't know much about the market at all. But some people are trying to figure it out. For groups like the spiders, only a fraction of species have been described, which means we do not know how many species are going extinct. Alice Hughes does not describe herself as a spider. person per se. I'm a biodiversity person.

But she likes them. And she doesn't get creeped out by any animal. Want proof? When I was eight years old, I had a corn snake that I took to school with me and sometimes we'd walk around my boarding school with my snake on my head, which didn't exactly go down well with everyone. That's never going to be my fashion statement. Snake in the hair.

Yeah. I think I'd rather a spider in the hair. Same. Oh, you know what? It's a real six in one, half dozen another. Today, Alice is a conservation biologist at the University of Hong Kong. And does she still wear a snake in her hair? Not sure. Not sure. I don't think so. But a few years ago, she and her colleagues decided to look into the arachnid trade online.

Why? We don't have good data on how many are being traded. We don't know what is being traded and we don't know where it's coming from. We need to get a better handle on that. First, they started by IDing websites that hosted spider sales. I mean, there's a Rackna boards. But then there are also increasingly ones on things like Etsy and Facebook and Instagram. And many of these are enthusiasts who are setting up their own websites.

Then they began scraping sales posts to see what kind of spiders and other arachnids were being sold. This is harder than it sounds. One species could go by many names. take India's red slate ornamental, also called a reddish parachute spider, or a Rufus parachute spider, or a Travancor slate red, or its scientific name, Pacilothera Rufalada. But even the scientific names are also inconsistent. And this is another problem in groups like the arachnids.

Sometimes species get elevated to genera and families change, and so it makes it much harder to do. CITES is the international organization. that oversees animal trade. That stands for a convention on international trade in endangered species of wild fauna and flora. If you asked CITES how many arachnate species were being bought and sold, they'd say, eh, about 30.

Ask U.S. fish in wildlife. They'd say, uh, about 270. Alice at all found 1,200, 1200 different arachnate species for sale. This means organizations tracking tracts. trade have a very incomplete picture. Why the discrepancy, though? 1,200 versus 30? This is for a number of reasons.

One of those is that people just don't care about the arachnids. Meaning, because the general public doesn't think too hard about the welfare of spiders, organizations like CITES and U.S. fish and wildlife do not regulate spider trade nearly as much as they do for more adorable animals. And the other thing is, as you say, many of them are not going to be shiardust. shipping them in an obvious way. They're going to be putting a load of slings in an envelope and putting it in the post. A sling, by the way, is a baby spider, which no thank you. Alice also found that it is very likely that there are species being traded that are actually undescribed species.

We should say that if a spider is mislabeled, that could be very bad for a collector. But to our main question, how many arachnids in trade are wild caught? I think we found on average about 68% or so come from the world. AKA like most of them, like almost all of them. Like 70%. That's a lot. Some experts say that figure is too high. It is hard to know for sure.

If it's over zero, it's too high, Dean, is what I'm saying. Debbie and Scott Scher, the owners of Arakna boards, recognize the power that their website has, or at least was part of. But do you ever worry that it has in some way made it easier to trade wild-caught arachnids or brown-box arachnids? Do you ever worry about that? I worry about it, but... Not on our site. Debbie says users aren't even allowed to discuss doing things below board, let alone do them.

And she would know she is the site's moderator. Bottom line is, can it happen? Yes. Do we allow it to happen? Knowingly, absolutely not. If it's brought to our attention, they're done. It would occur regardless of whether Arakna Bords was a site or not. It's the interconnectivity from the internet at this point that is more of an issue than anything our site does. To be fair, the spider web is now vast. and tangled. Arakna Boards is far from the only place to host spider sales. And they do have a thread dedicated to calling out shady sellers. Still, how do you fix things?

I feel, how do I put this? It's like I feel that it should be done through legal means, through governments. But the problem is, is that the governments don't care about spiders. And all they want to do is shut it down, shut it down, shut it down, shut it down. Governments don't care about spiders is for some reason to me of humorous statement. Hey man, a lot of people feel that way. Linda Raher at Cornell had this to say about spider regulations. I don't want them taken out of the wild and stripped.

How you control that, I don't know. But I think there has been a tendency to go overboard. For instance, Linda told me there's been a big push to list the Indian ornamentals, one of her favorites. endangered. This would mean that none could be imported in. And more importantly, here in the states, they would regulate selling the spiders out of state. Right now, the U.S. has a sort of blacklist, something that says you cannot import these specific spiders because they're endangered or invasive or murderous or whatever. In 2022, Congress tried to pass a bill to switch the way they do things and create a white list, meaning you could only import specific, identified, well-studied

species. Alice Hughes, the scientist who did the online spider study, she is into that idea. It means that you can have much more control of the market. But it never passed. For now, if you really want to have a pet spider, again, no clue why you would. But if you did want one the best thing to do? Literally just search for it and make sure that they have a listing that says that their animals are sustainably bred in captivity.

What I have looked for is people who are very clear that they are doing captive breeding in their own facilities. Research it beforehand kind of thing. Like, tarantulas are great, but like with any

living creature, know what you're getting into before you get into it. Arakno Bords was like the first strand of Gossamer in what became a gigantic spider web. A web that now includes TikTok and Etsy and Instagram. This web has transformed spider trade. Information is more accessible, as are the spiders themselves. Is that a good or bad thing? It's a tangle.

And even though Arakno Bords is full of arachno fanatics who have gone full Pokemon and caught them all, or a lot of them, Debbie and Scott are a little different. In fact, currently, that count is actually at zero. Oh, surprising. The last one passed away a few years ago. The last one passed away a couple of years ago. Which was our first? Harry, the original.

Rest in terror, Harry. Scott says after Harry died, that was it for him. His tarantula keeping days are over. But? Is that true for you too, Debbie? Well, I'm not going to... And you know what, Debbie? Take out that coin of the realm and knock yourself out.

That's what I say. If you love spiders, you got to love them. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by me, Dean Russell, and it is co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson, who is somewhere in the forest right now surrounded by spiders. Mix, sound design, and original. music, synthi's sticky vibes by the Hursuit, Matt Reed. The rest of our team is Amory

Sievertson, Emily Jankowski, Samata Joshi, Grace Tatter, Paul Vicus, and Quincy Walters. Endless thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and some phrase that Ben wrote that I cannot read the shedded car as... Oh, the shedded carcass of an electric blue tarantula, which technically if it's shedded it's just skin and not a carcass, but hey, what am I to say? If you have an unsolved mystery

or an untold history that you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless thread at wb-r.org.