"...they had no permit for collection[;] he didn't know they need one"
March 4, 2019 6:18 PM Subscribe
This amazing blue tarantula is a new spider species—but did researchers break the law when they studied it? Dr Law Yao Hua, insect behavioural ecologist, writes for Science magazine on bio-piracy through the lens of a recently 'discovered' Sarawakian blue tarantula from Malaysia and the burgeoning illegal tarantula trade.
He was also on BFM to talk further on the story [podcast]
From the podcast description: A new spider species - Birupes simoroxigorum - was described in the February issue of The Journal of the British Tarantula Society, by arachnologists Ray Gabriel and Danniella Sherwood. The species is native to Sarawak, and the three European collectors who provided the specimens to the arachnologists are said to have captured the animals in the forests of Sarawak, and transported them to Europe. But the Forest Department of Sarawak says they lacked permits to collect or export wildlife. Is this a case of biopiracy? We speak about the growing illegal trade of tarantulas and more, with Dr Law Yao Hua, an insect behavioural ecologist and a freelance science writer on ecology and evolution who highlighted this case in an article in Science.
Legally, Malaysia (one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries) is a signatory on the Convention for Biological Diversity, and passed in 2017 a National Bill on Access & Benefit Sharing ("The bill implements the provisions of the Convention on Biological Diversity regarding the granting of access to genetic resources that are subject to the country’s sovereignty and the sharing of benefits from the exploitation of such resources.") and has recently acceded to the Nagoya Protocol under the Convention, which will come in effect into the country in this month.
[note on the naming convention: Malaysian Chinese like Dr Law has three-part names that places their family names first, and their given names are the two names following that.]
From the podcast description: A new spider species - Birupes simoroxigorum - was described in the February issue of The Journal of the British Tarantula Society, by arachnologists Ray Gabriel and Danniella Sherwood. The species is native to Sarawak, and the three European collectors who provided the specimens to the arachnologists are said to have captured the animals in the forests of Sarawak, and transported them to Europe. But the Forest Department of Sarawak says they lacked permits to collect or export wildlife. Is this a case of biopiracy? We speak about the growing illegal trade of tarantulas and more, with Dr Law Yao Hua, an insect behavioural ecologist and a freelance science writer on ecology and evolution who highlighted this case in an article in Science.
Legally, Malaysia (one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries) is a signatory on the Convention for Biological Diversity, and passed in 2017 a National Bill on Access & Benefit Sharing ("The bill implements the provisions of the Convention on Biological Diversity regarding the granting of access to genetic resources that are subject to the country’s sovereignty and the sharing of benefits from the exploitation of such resources.") and has recently acceded to the Nagoya Protocol under the Convention, which will come in effect into the country in this month.
[note on the naming convention: Malaysian Chinese like Dr Law has three-part names that places their family names first, and their given names are the two names following that.]
How the actual fuck did they not know they needed a permit for collection? Granted, all my international fieldwork (one whooooole summer) was done in Costa Rica, which is on top of this sort of thing, but I've trapped live mice and brought them back to the USA through Customs and picked them up too, and we have to have individual scientific passports and declarations of what exactly we're trapping and permits for tissues kept and permits for live-trapped animals and stated destinations for those animals and declarations of monetary value. Every few years we do this and it takes a while, because Costa Rica (and Panama, where I know a number of people working) are very careful about stewardship of their local flora and fauna.
Now, Central America is just where I happen to be most familiar. I'm definitely impressed and honestly delighted by the investment that Costa Rica puts into caring for its local wildlife and ecosystem, at least from my end, but perhaps Malaysia doesn't have the resources to do that and look after the country's people, too. I freely admit I'm less familiar with Malaysia, but I don't know anyone doing fieldwork who doesn't routinely do permitting to trap live animals or interact with big animals in any nation.
These people! They have to know other field entomologists or field ecologists or biologists! Research permits are standard motherfucking procedure when trapping live animals or dead ones! How in the holy hell can you claim to not know you have to do that or verify that collectors have definitely done it before you get involved? And how on earth could any halfway decent collector "not know" that they need to get permitting for something they are presumably doing as a job? That's got more than a whiff of bullshit to it.
Why in the hell don't the EU have laws that punish willful breaking of other nation's wildlife laws? God, the thing where the poor wildlife director hopes he can just bar the collectors from returning because that's all he can do--I just! AUGH. Not okay.
posted by sciatrix at 8:28 PM on March 4, 2019 [17 favorites]
Now, Central America is just where I happen to be most familiar. I'm definitely impressed and honestly delighted by the investment that Costa Rica puts into caring for its local wildlife and ecosystem, at least from my end, but perhaps Malaysia doesn't have the resources to do that and look after the country's people, too. I freely admit I'm less familiar with Malaysia, but I don't know anyone doing fieldwork who doesn't routinely do permitting to trap live animals or interact with big animals in any nation.
These people! They have to know other field entomologists or field ecologists or biologists! Research permits are standard motherfucking procedure when trapping live animals or dead ones! How in the holy hell can you claim to not know you have to do that or verify that collectors have definitely done it before you get involved? And how on earth could any halfway decent collector "not know" that they need to get permitting for something they are presumably doing as a job? That's got more than a whiff of bullshit to it.
Why in the hell don't the EU have laws that punish willful breaking of other nation's wildlife laws? God, the thing where the poor wildlife director hopes he can just bar the collectors from returning because that's all he can do--I just! AUGH. Not okay.
posted by sciatrix at 8:28 PM on March 4, 2019 [17 favorites]
Research permits are standard motherfucking procedure when trapping live animals or dead ones! How in the holy hell can you claim to not know you have to do that or verify that collectors have definitely done it before you get involved?
Let Dave Chappelle explain.
posted by Joe in Australia at 11:57 PM on March 4, 2019
Let Dave Chappelle explain.
posted by Joe in Australia at 11:57 PM on March 4, 2019
Well, the thing is, though..
We are in the midst of the Anthopocene extinction event right this minute. If that new tarantula was not discovered, odds are in 50 or 100 years it will be extinct as its environment degrades and changes.
So now, it is famous, and a desired pet / lab specimen / whatever. It is almost certainly now saved from extinction.
Just sayin'...
posted by Meatbomb at 1:05 AM on March 5, 2019
We are in the midst of the Anthopocene extinction event right this minute. If that new tarantula was not discovered, odds are in 50 or 100 years it will be extinct as its environment degrades and changes.
So now, it is famous, and a desired pet / lab specimen / whatever. It is almost certainly now saved from extinction.
Just sayin'...
posted by Meatbomb at 1:05 AM on March 5, 2019
At least from what is in the article, there is no way that the spider collectors didn't know they were skirting or breaking laws (having your driver mail the package does not get you off the hook), and the researchers had only the thinnest veneer of plausibility, claiming that the collectors had told them they were legit, but not verifying this at all (not even by asking for papers that might be false, say).
posted by Dip Flash at 6:04 AM on March 5, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by Dip Flash at 6:04 AM on March 5, 2019 [2 favorites]
Nope! This is terrible, unethical, and these spiders are not going to have been saved from extinction by being collected and having dead specimens illegally shipped to Europe. Also, I'd 99% guarantee local populations already knew about the existence of these spiders.
For context, to get permission to export urine - not even an entire animal - from Indonesia takes multiple years. It took me 8 months to get my permits to conduct research. We applied for export permits back in December 2018. We've received our permits to remove samples from the national park and transport them to Jakarta. We still haven't received our permits to ship samples out of the country - and these aren't even animals.
People like the original collectors and the researchers who unquestioningly accepted/purposely shadily collected and accepted samples without permits and then published on them actively make life worse for researchers like me in Southeast Asia who are trying to conduct research ethically without triggering fears of biopiracy while promoting conservation. Any time there's an illegal trade in animals, it makes conservation work more challenging. Any time someone foreign does something sketchy in the name of science, it makes the work of ethical but foreign researchers more challenging. I know people who no longer work in Malaysia and Indonesia because of how onerous the regulations are - and this has a net negative for wildlife conservation in Southeast Asia. I have access to funding and networks and training and techniques that my Indonesian collaborators don't have, and part of the process of getting permission to work in Indonesia is to plan capacity building and resource sharing with local researchers. You don't just get to opt out of ethical research and publish anyways.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:19 AM on March 5, 2019 [17 favorites]
For context, to get permission to export urine - not even an entire animal - from Indonesia takes multiple years. It took me 8 months to get my permits to conduct research. We applied for export permits back in December 2018. We've received our permits to remove samples from the national park and transport them to Jakarta. We still haven't received our permits to ship samples out of the country - and these aren't even animals.
People like the original collectors and the researchers who unquestioningly accepted/purposely shadily collected and accepted samples without permits and then published on them actively make life worse for researchers like me in Southeast Asia who are trying to conduct research ethically without triggering fears of biopiracy while promoting conservation. Any time there's an illegal trade in animals, it makes conservation work more challenging. Any time someone foreign does something sketchy in the name of science, it makes the work of ethical but foreign researchers more challenging. I know people who no longer work in Malaysia and Indonesia because of how onerous the regulations are - and this has a net negative for wildlife conservation in Southeast Asia. I have access to funding and networks and training and techniques that my Indonesian collaborators don't have, and part of the process of getting permission to work in Indonesia is to plan capacity building and resource sharing with local researchers. You don't just get to opt out of ethical research and publish anyways.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:19 AM on March 5, 2019 [17 favorites]
So now, it is famous, and a desired pet / lab specimen / whatever. It is almost certainly now saved from extinction.
To follow up on this, and with a grateful nod to Chura for the region-specific expertise:
Wild animals being desirable pets does not mean that they are saved from extinction. Not all wild animals breed well in captivity, and when people first collect a wild species and start trying to keep it in captivity, it is extremely common for captive specimens to die as people try to execute a trial-and-error husbandry approach. I have friends who spent years trying to maintain lab colonies of social spiders, for example. I personally spent a surprising amount of time trying to figure out when my non-melanogaster fruit flies were actually likely to breed in undergrad. There's a huge learning curve when you're trying to culture any animal species that isn't frequently kept in captivity for the first time, and that's also true for tarantulas.
This spider is extremely unlikely to be picked up as a lab model organism unless someone effectively stakes their career on it, speaking as the student of someone who did build his career on developing an unstudied species to study. It happens, but without some a priori really interesting trait, like maybe someone taking an interest in the biomechanical basis of the coloration or the evolution of the color or they do an interesting behavior or whatever, there's no real reason to house them in captivity. (Honestly, for a lot of those questions, there still isn't a reason to house them in captivity if you only need a few samples to do the work.) So take labs out of the equation for a minute. Say that this thing is in demand for the pet trade.
The pet market wants adult spiders--the bigger, the better--and if you're selling for a pet market, well, if they die pretty soon after they get there, that makes things better for you, right? That's another potential customer. If you can breed them easily, you can corner the market briefly, but you can't desex a spider, and they lose value quickly as everyone breeds them. The incentives for someone selling for a pet market are skewed rather farther along the way to "capture adults where possible" and maybe "learn how to breed rare and difficult to breed species" than they are to "breed many easily-cultured individuals and increase the population size in a sustainable way."
Pet markets incentivize wholesalers to remove adult animals from the wild where they often do not survive. They are not a fucking panacea for conservation efforts. They do not help this problem. They exacerbate it. And researchers have no damn business participating in that exacerbation and making careers off of this kind of unethical behavior.
posted by sciatrix at 10:16 AM on March 5, 2019 [15 favorites]
To follow up on this, and with a grateful nod to Chura for the region-specific expertise:
Wild animals being desirable pets does not mean that they are saved from extinction. Not all wild animals breed well in captivity, and when people first collect a wild species and start trying to keep it in captivity, it is extremely common for captive specimens to die as people try to execute a trial-and-error husbandry approach. I have friends who spent years trying to maintain lab colonies of social spiders, for example. I personally spent a surprising amount of time trying to figure out when my non-melanogaster fruit flies were actually likely to breed in undergrad. There's a huge learning curve when you're trying to culture any animal species that isn't frequently kept in captivity for the first time, and that's also true for tarantulas.
This spider is extremely unlikely to be picked up as a lab model organism unless someone effectively stakes their career on it, speaking as the student of someone who did build his career on developing an unstudied species to study. It happens, but without some a priori really interesting trait, like maybe someone taking an interest in the biomechanical basis of the coloration or the evolution of the color or they do an interesting behavior or whatever, there's no real reason to house them in captivity. (Honestly, for a lot of those questions, there still isn't a reason to house them in captivity if you only need a few samples to do the work.) So take labs out of the equation for a minute. Say that this thing is in demand for the pet trade.
The pet market wants adult spiders--the bigger, the better--and if you're selling for a pet market, well, if they die pretty soon after they get there, that makes things better for you, right? That's another potential customer. If you can breed them easily, you can corner the market briefly, but you can't desex a spider, and they lose value quickly as everyone breeds them. The incentives for someone selling for a pet market are skewed rather farther along the way to "capture adults where possible" and maybe "learn how to breed rare and difficult to breed species" than they are to "breed many easily-cultured individuals and increase the population size in a sustainable way."
Pet markets incentivize wholesalers to remove adult animals from the wild where they often do not survive. They are not a fucking panacea for conservation efforts. They do not help this problem. They exacerbate it. And researchers have no damn business participating in that exacerbation and making careers off of this kind of unethical behavior.
posted by sciatrix at 10:16 AM on March 5, 2019 [15 favorites]
Thanks for the details sciatrix. I hope these guys thrive but I guess it is not as straightforward as I thought. Everything looks easy from the outside.
posted by Meatbomb at 8:50 AM on March 6, 2019
posted by Meatbomb at 8:50 AM on March 6, 2019
The Journal of the British Tarantula Society ought to publish an erratum to the article describing the new species, explaining the violation in professional ethics. The species can't be un-described, but the researchers who failed to do due diligence shouldn't be able to get credit for this either.
posted by biogeo at 10:27 AM on March 6, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by biogeo at 10:27 AM on March 6, 2019 [3 favorites]
« Older A woman writing a novel with food | Poop Wars and the Poop Drug Cartel Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by turbid dahlia at 8:27 PM on March 4, 2019