https://nautil.us/the-hidden-butterfly-trade-510827/
"Sitting at what was once Vladimir Nabokov’s desk in Harvard University’s
Museum of Comparative Zoology, graduate student Zhengyang Wang spent hours
pouring over the final details of insect anatomy. Nabokov, like Wang, was a
keen-eyed entomologist, enraptured by butterflies.
The celebrated 20th-century novelist and young evolutionary biologist are, of
course, not the only ones afflicted with this particular fixation. Butterflies
and their images have flitted through cultures and mythologies for millennia,
and still exercise a powerful hold on contemporary fancies. These delicate
insects are perhaps the most extensively traded animals on the planet. In an
unnatural migration, their iridescent wings stilled, they soar (or steam)
across oceans and continents, possibly by the hundreds of thousands, each year.
But just how many are traveling, of which potentially endangered or threatened
species, and from which points of origin, has been a mystery. Unlike elephant
ivory or pangolin hide, butterflies pass invisibly through X-ray scanners at
international ports of entry.
So Wang and a team of international collaborators set out to decipher one
substantial marketplace where the dead butterfly trade becomes visible: eBay.
They analyzed one year’s worth of transactions of butterfly species on that
platform and counted more than 50,550 individual butterfly sales, as they
described in their paper, published last year in
Biological Conservation.
These purchases included members of more than 3,760 different species—about 1
in 5 of all known butterfly species on Earth.
Most of these butterflies are collected from the wild, typically from the
Global South, before flowing northward, often through local and regional
brokers. And these wildlands are often delicate habitats, where a butterfly
species relies on just one type of host-plant on which to reproduce (like
monarchs on milkweed).
What’s more is that the rarer a specimen, the higher a price it can fetch.
Whereas a common (if stunning)
Morpho menelaus from South America sold for an
average of $28.52, the researchers found, a pair of endangered
Bhutanitis
ludlowi from India brought in $8,998. Taking endangered species from the wild
is illegal, as is selling them. But these transactions sailed under the radar.
And close to a quarter of the 207 butterfly species listed as “endangered” or
“vulnerable” by the IUCN (itself likely a vast undercount) showed up in the
eBay sales they tracked for the year.
Wang’s work has led him to a counterintuitive take on butterfly conservation,
though: Don’t worry too much about the collectors (or the sellers) of these
on-the-edge species; focus instead on the butterflies’ native habitats. And one
way to do that might just look like … catching more butterflies."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
