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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.

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