How the internet changed the spider trade

In 1994, when Debby and Scott Scher bought their first tarantula, they did not know much about how to care for it. The seller told them to just give her crickets and water "once in a while."

Back then, few online spaces had helpful information on tarantula care. That gave the couple an idea. They created a website eventually named Arachnoboards. It grew into a one-stop-shop for spider fans, science, caretaking advice, and — perhaps, most transformatively — trade.

A vast web of online communities has since emerged with serious spider collectors on Arachnoboards, Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok. With new, exotic species available at the click of a button, the spider trade changed forever, and it is now a multimillion-dollar industry.

Endless Thread producer Dean Russell and co-host Ben Brock Johnson untangle what that change has meant for the spiders themselves.

Show notes

This content was originally created for audio. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Ben Brock Johnson: Debby 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.

Dean Russell: Like this one time, that same year, they were at the New York Renaissance Faire. And Scott saw something he thought was pretty cool.

Scott Scher: We were walking around, and there was a vendor there that had a few of them, all different kinds.

Ben: Scott had never owned one of these things before. But once he saw 'em, he was hooked. He was reaching for his coin of the realm.

Scott: We kept passing this booth and kept passing this booth, and every time we passed the booth, I would turn to Debby and go, We need to get one.

Dean: Debby was not into it.

Debby Scher: 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.

Ben: But then...

Debby: 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.

Dean: Did you name the spider? 

Scott: It was Hairy.

Dean: Okay, yes. 

Scott: That, that was its name.

Dean: Two large fangs. Eight hirsute legs. Body the size of your palm.

Ben: Hairy was a typical pinkish-brownish tarantula called a Chilean rose hair. The kind you can get at any pet store. The kind that is my personal, living nightmare.

Dean: Scott, however, was enthralled.

Scott: 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. 

Debby: Well, you make sure they don't escape.

Dean: They brought Hairy home in a pink Pet Pal container, put her in the computer room, and shut the door. The seller told them to just give him her crickets and water once in a while.

Scott: That was basically the extent of our tarantula care knowledge. 

Debby: Once in a while. Yep. 

Ben: Any schooled spider hobbyist will tell you this is the equivalent of adopting a dog and being told: "Eh, you'll figure it out." Debby says she knew very little about tarantulas.

Debby: 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 two in there?"

Dean: Scott ran into the room. And he was like, Oh, Hairy's just molting.

Debby: I'm like, what the hell does that mean? 

Ben: Yeah, you and me both, Debby.

Dean: It meant Hairy was shedding her skin.

Ben: You know, just normal tarantula stuff.

Debby: That was one of the most horrifying and exciting and exhilarating moments when, you know, that was the initial turning point for me.

Dean: This was Debby's turning point from arachnophobe to arachnophile...

Ben: Never would have happened to me. Debby, why?

Dean: ...because this was the moment Debby realized these creatures were fascinating if you were willing to get to know them. To do a little bit of research.

Ben: Nope, I prefer to stay stupid and fearful. Today, if you go to a Renaissance faire 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.

Dean: And that gave Scott and Debby an idea.

Scott: We just wanted to create a site where some people, if anyone got on the internet and looked for information about tarantulas, that they might be able to find something that might be helpful to them. And that was why Arachnoboards was born.

Ben: What they didn't know — and what you may not know — is that Arachnoboards.com would become one of the most used, most well-known websites for spider fans, spider bros, spider collectors of all types.

Debby: It's pretty much opened a door that most people didn't even know the door existed.

Dean: That door has likely 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 Hair Russell.

Ben: I'm Ben Blue Fang Johnson. And you're listening to Endless Dread.

Dean: We're crawling into your ears from WBUR, Boston's NPR egg sac.

Ben: 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."

Dean: So, Ben, how excited were you when I pitched this story?

Ben: Ugh. I think it's best if me and spiders don't get together.

Dean: I never understood why you hate spiders so much.

Ben: It's not rational. I don't hate them. I just don't want them in my zone. You know?

Dean: Are you a person who sees a spider in your house and they move them, or do you kill the spider?

Ben: That is a great question, and I have really tried to evolve my approach from killing to moving. Even I will say that there have been spiders in my basement podcast studio that I have allowed to coexist with me. But my natural tendency when I see a spider is to throw a large piece of furniture at it.

Dean: I will admit, I'm not an arachnophile. But the reason I came to this story was because about a year ago, TikTok decided to make me one.

[tiana_thebuglady on TikTok: 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. You're a sweetheart.]

Dean: One day The Algorithm started giving me videos by people like Tiana The Bug Lady...who keeps tiny pet jumping spiders:

[tiana_thebuglady on TikTok: You wanna see just how aware jumping spiders are? Watch this. Excuse me.]

Ben: I mean, it's almost cute. It's a tiny, cute spider that fits on the tip of your fingers. And there's little captions, and oh — the spider pooped? Maybe?

Dean: Yes. But the more I started to watch videos with cute, tiny jumping spiders, the more I also started to see other spiders. Huge hairy tarantulas.

Ben: Yeah, I think tarantulas are where I get off the train. Immediately. That's where I jump off the moving train.

Dean: That's fair. If you go down this burrow, though, you will see many types of spiders. You will see Brazilian black tarantulas...

[OhWitchPlz on TikTok: Honestly, he's gotten way bigger, so he's — Oh! He's so cool!]

Dean: You will see salmon pink bird-eating tarantulas...

Ben: No. Bird-eating? No.

Dean: ...you'll see hissing tarantulas...

[Hissing tarantula on TikTok]

Dean: ...fighting tarantulas...

[Fighting tarantula on TikTok]

Dean: ...tap-dancing male suitor tarantulas...

[Tapping tarantula on TikTok]

Ben: Wow, TarantulaTok is real!

Dean: It's very real. Now, tarantulas are big in the exotic pet trade. The market is well into the multimillions. And so, on a whim, I asked some experts if — or how — TarantulaTok is changing the industry.

They told me that I was kind of asking the wrong question. The right question: How has Arachnoboards changed the industry?

Dean: When I talk to tarantula hobbyists, tarantula scientists, regulators, everyone mentions Arachnoboards. And, as the people behind it, when did you start to realize that this is a website of note? 

Scott: To be honest with you, I still can't believe that it's a website of note.

Debby: It's still, it's still, like, amazing to us. 

Scott: Yeah. 

Ben: Scott and Debby set up the first iteration of Arachnoboards — a Comic Sans gem called Arachnopets — around the year 2000. (The year 2000!) It was a passion project. They say they've never taken a profit from the site.

Dean: Even today, the site is not very flashy. Picture early Reddit, but for spiders. There are 90,000 members; 200,000 threads; 3 million messages.

Ben: Alright, that might sound small compared to a place like Reddit, but these are not casual users. They are hardcore spider nerds.

Scott: What you find on Arachnoboards is...

Debby: Experience.

Scott: ...collective experience. Thousands and thousands of years of collective experience.

Ben: Why was all this collective experience necessary? Well, having a husky versus having a chihuahua is not the same thing as having an Arizona desert blonde and tree-dwelling Gooty sapphire.

All dogs are the same species. Tarantula species number over one thousand.

Dean: They act differently, eat different things, they live in different climates, and they have different venom.

Ben: They murder you in different ways. They murder you for different reasons.

Dean: (Laughs.) All of this is partially why Arachnoboards became so popular. People were dying for hyper-detailed advice.

Ben: Advice in threads like... "Rosehair mating."

Dean: “Stromatopelma bites.”

Ben: "How to prekill a superworm without making a mess."

Dean: "T. albo acting strange."

Ben: "Curly hairs abound!!!"

Dean: "Maggots."

Ben: But maybe the biggest effect Arachnoboards 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. Full-on obsession. Pokemon-style.

Dean: So, in trying to understand how the website Arachnoboards has changed the spider world, we talked to collectors who keep literally hundreds of spiders in their home. They told us their collections, in large part, were thanks to Arachnoboards.

Linda Rayor: I went crazy, and I understand why people went crazy. You know, I started getting all these different species and trying things out.

Ben: I guess just the idea of being like, "Why don't I just try getting this species into my house..."

Dean: Well, obviously, you are not Linda Rayor.

Linda: I study Australian huntsman spiders, which are very cool because they live in large family groups of up to 150.

Ben: Yes, Linda and I have very different ideas of what "cool" means.

Linda: Someone once looked at them and said, Wow, these are credit card spiders. They're so flat, but they're big spiders, and lots of people from around the world write me because they're not available in the pet trade.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: To be clear, Dr. Linda Rayor does not sell arachnids, including huntsman spiders.]

Dean: Linda doesn't hobby. She is a behavioral ecologist at Cornell.

Ben: And president of the American Arachnology Society.

Dean: She started studying spiders because, in grad school, she got the feeling that they were being ignored.

Linda: I was finding all of these large, totally cool spiders. And I kept bringing them to the entomology grad students and saying, Wow, look at this. What is it? And they said, Spiders don't matter. We don't care. They're not important.

Ben: And that's our show, folks! Spiders are not important! Everybody go home!

Dean: They are! Take it from Charlotte, the world's most famous spider...

[Charlotte in Charlotte's Web (1973): Do you realize that if I didn't eat them, bugs would get so numerous, they'd destroy the Earth?]

Dean: Spiders help keep our ecosystems in check.

Linda: Worldwide, spiders are eating more prey, primarily insect prey, than all the weight of humans on Earth on an annual basis.

Ben: I'm just sayin', not all of us take such a positive spin. Just think of the world's second-most famous spider...

[Gollum in The Two Towers (2002): Caught in a web / Soon he'll be ... eaten.]

Dean: Hey man, I think Gollum just set up Shelob...

Ben: Shelob just trying to eat? Is that what you were saying?

Dean: Yeah, she was just eating Orcs, having a fine time. She gets a bad wrap, basically.

Ben: Yeah, she gets a bad wrap for a massive, cave-dwelling, murderous spider. Yes, I agree.

Dean: Anyway, in the early 2000s, Linda Rayor was teaching a class on spiders. So she decided to get a class tarantula.

Linda: 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.

Dean: "Boring" tarantulas, she says. But then she stumbled upon this new URL.

Dean: How would you describe Arachnoboards to someone who has never been to that website? 

Linda: It's wanted ads. It's wanted and selling ads.

Ben: Arachnoboards had set up a Classifieds 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 sale.

Linda: I had no idea that tarantulas themselves were so incredibly diverse and beautiful.

Dean: Like the Socotra Island Blue Baboon.

Linda: These are beautiful, big, burrowing tarantulas that live in big groups and pile on one another kind of like sardines.

Dean: Or, her favorite, the Indian ornamental.

Linda: 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.

Ben: With the dawn of Arachnoboards came a wave of new hobbyists with that obsession to catch 'em all. Suddenly, you could easily order spiders through the mail. In a box. Or an envelope. Yes, through the mail!

Dean: These days, people post unboxing videos on YouTube all the time. They'll even order "mystery boxes..."

Ben: ...as in, you don't know what spiders you get until they get there.

[The Dark Den on YouTube: Twenty tarantulas. Holy moly! Last time they sent ten. And that was a lot.]

Dean: 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 has also had some negative effects.

Ben: Uh, yeah.

Linda: 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.

Ben: The sticky, tricky ethics of the spider pet trade...in a minute.

[SPONSOR BREAK]

Ben: For collectors of anything, there is usually a strong desire for The New Thing. But when you factor in the internet — sites like Arachnoboards — and the fact that spiders are living beings, we wondered, what does that desire mean for the spiders themselves?

Dean: 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 Columbia.

Ben: See, like this is amazing that new species are always being discovered. And also it really reminds me of the movie Arachnophobia. It just makes so much more sense that there might be an undiscovered species still in modern day that could just be cool or could potentially be terrifying and shipped on accident from South America to North America, and all hell might break loose.

Dean: Yeah. Arachnophobia. Scientifically accurate.

Ben: (Laughs.)

Dean: Since Arachnoboards started, 200 new species have been uncovered. When discoveries happen, things can get out of hand. For instance, Linda Rayor at Cornell told us about an incident a few years ago...

Ben: Back in 2017, two wildlife photographers were traveling through Sarawak, Borneo, when they came across a tarantula with electric blue legs.

Linda: It's beautiful. And it was what's being called the Bornean neon-blue leg tarantula.

Dean: 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. If you were on the Spider Web at the time, you would have seen these photos. 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.

Ben: But here's the thing. Sarawak is a small place. Tarantula sellers from Poland, the UK, Germany, and likely, locally took note. So...

Linda: Literally, within weeks of him publishing this picture online, the population was collected out almost immediately.

Dean: Collected out. As in tarantula poachers swept into the Bornean forest, bagged the bugs, and smuggled them out without permits.

Ben: That's a job you will never get me to do. Bug bagger.

You could do this by something called "brown-boxing." Put 'em in the mail, and just don't tell customs that the box has spiders in it. Easy peasy.

Dean: And not long after, the blue-leg went up for sale online. 300 bucks a pop.

Ben: Allow me to ask a question I absolutely know the answer to. But why, pray tell, are wild-caught tarantulas a bad thing?

Dean: 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.

Ben: 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.

Linda: In practical terms, what that means is if collectors come in, they can literally wipe out a population in one spot very, very easily.

Dean: 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.

Ben: 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.

Alice Hughes: 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.

Dean: Alice Hughes does not describe herself as a spider person per se.

Alice: I'm a biodiversity person.

Dean: But she likes 'em.

Ben: And she doesn't get creeped out. By any animal. Want proof?

Alice: When I was eight years old, I had a corn snake that I took to school with me, and sometimes would walk around my boarding school with my snake on my head, which didn't exactly go down well with everyone.

Dean: That's never going to be my fashion statement. Snake in the hair. I think I'd rather have a spider in my hair.

Ben: It's a real six in one, half-dozen in the other.

Dean: Today, Alice is a conservation biologist at the University of Hong Kong.

Ben: And does she still wear a snake in her hair, Dean?

Dean: Not sure, not sure. But a few years ago, she and her colleagues decided to look into the arachnid trade online. Why?

Alice: 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.

Ben: First, they started by ID'ing websites that hosted spider sales...

Alice: I mean, there's Arachnoboards, 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.

Dean: Then, they began scraping sales posts to see what kinds of spiders and other arachnids were being sold.

Ben: 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...

Dean: Or a rufus parachute spider...

Ben: Or a Travancore slate-red...

Dean: Or, its scientific name, Poecilotheria rufilata.

Ben: But even the scientific names are also inconsistent...

Alice: 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.

Ben: CITES is the international organization that oversees animal trade.

Dean: That stands for Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

Ben: If you asked CITES how many arachnid species were being bought and sold, they'd say about 30. Ask U.S. Fish and Wildlife, they'd say about 270.

Dean: Alice et al. found 1200! 1200 different arachnid species for sale. This means organizations tracking trade have a very incomplete picture.

Ben: Why the discrepancy, though? 1200 vs 30?

Alice: This is for a number of reasons. One of those is that people just don't care about the arachnids.

Dean: 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.

Alice: And the other thing is, as you say, many of them are not going to be 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.

Ben: A sling, by the way, is a baby spider. Which... no, thank you.

Dean: Alice also found that...

Alice: ...it is very likely that there are species being traded that are actually undescribed species.

Ben: We should say that if a spider is mislabeled, that could be very bad for a collector.

Dean: But to our main question: How many arachnids in trade are wild-caught?

Alice: I think we found, on average, about 68 percent or so come from the wild.

Ben: A.K.A., like most of them! Like 70 percent! That's a lot.

Dean: Some experts say that figure is too high. It is hard to know for sure.

Ben: If it's over zero, it's too high, Dean, is what I'm saying.

Dean: Debbie and Scott Sher, the owners of Arachnoboards, recognize the power that their website has or at least was part of. But...

Dean: 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?

Scott: I worry about it, but—

Debby: Not on our site. 

Ben: Debby 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.

Debby: 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.

Scott: It would occur regardless of whether Arachnoboards 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.

Dean: To be fair, the Spider Web is now vast and tangled. Arachnoboards 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?

Scott: I feel, ugh, how do I put this? It's like I feel that it should be done through legal means, through governments. But the problem is that the governments don't care about spiders.

Debby: And all they want to do is shut it down, shut it down, shut it down. 

Ben: "Governments don't care about spiders" is, for some reason, to me, a humorous statement.

Dean: Hey man, a lot of people feel that way. Linda Rayor at Cornell had this to say about spider regulations...

Linda: I don't want them taken out of the wild and stripped. How you control that, I don't know. But I think, um, there has been a tendency to go overboard.

Dean: For instance, Linda told me there's been a big push to list Indian ornamentals — one of her favorites — as endangered.

Linda: 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.

Ben: 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.

Dean: In 2022, Congress tried to pass a bill to switch the way they do things and create a whitelist — 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.

Alice: It means that you can have much more control of the market.

Dean: But it never passed.

Ben: For now, if you really want to have a pet spider — again, no clue why you would — but if you want one, the best thing to do?

Alice: Literally, just search for it, and make sure that they have a listing that says that their animals are sustainably bred in captivity.

Linda: What I have looked for is people who are very clear that they are doing captive breeding in their own facilities.

Scott: Research it beforehand, kind of thing. 

Debby: Do your due diligence. 

Scott: Like tarantulas are great, but like with any living creature, know what you're getting into before you get into it. 

Dean: Arachnoboards 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.

Ben: And even though Arachnoboards is full of arachno-fanatics who have gone full Pokémon and caught 'em all — or a lot of 'em — Debby and Scott are a little different. In fact...

Scott: Currently, that count is actually at zero. 

Dean: Oh! Surprising. 

Debby: The last one passed away a few years ago. 

Scott: The last one passed away a couple years ago, and I—

Debby: Which was our first. 

Scott: Hairy. The original. 

Dean: Oh, Hairy.

Ben: Rest in terror, Hairy.

Scott says after Hairy died, that was it for him. His tarantula-keeping days are over. But...

Dean: Is that true for you, too, Debby?

Debby: Well, I'm not gonna...

Dean: (Laughs.)

Ben: And you know what, Debby? Take out that coin of the realm and knock yourself out. That's what I say. If you love spiders, you gotta love 'em.

Dean: 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 by the hirsute Matt Reed. The rest of our team is Amory Sivertson, Emily Jankowski, Samata Joshi, Grace Tatter, Paul Vaitkus, and Quincy Walters.

Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and the shedded car as of an electric blue tarantula.

If you have an unsolved mystery or an untold history that you want us to tell, hit us up. Endless Thread at WBUR dot org.