However, keeping tarantulas as pets does not appear to be the current driver of the commercial market. A few 43% of tarantula species are traded as souvenirs (for editing and post-mortem framing), as research tools and for medicine, according to a study. The souvenir market seems to be growing the fastest.

Wildlife poaching grew exponentially in the 1970s and 1980s; around the same time, herding tarantulas as pets became popular. As demand grew, so did captive breeding and the legal trade market. However, Peeler believes the illegal tarantula market has grown more rapidly because doing everything honestly takes time and money and involves acquiring permits. And this exploded with the advent of the Internet; therefore, that it was much easier for traders and tarantula fans to come together.

There are seemingly infinite means of transporting small invertebrates, making regulation of the commercial market a complex and potentially untenable endeavor. In 2010, a German sent hundreds of baby tarantulas wrapped in multi-colored straws via the US Postal Service. In December 2021, Colombian authorities at El Dorado Airport arrested two people attempting to smuggle more than 230 tarantulas to Europe in a single suitcase.

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Hughes says the other reason regulating the tarantula trade is difficult is the lack of existing data (ecology, distribution and population trends) on the animals. It also makes it difficult to assess the full impact of illegal trade on species. There is at least 1,000 known species of tarantulas in the world today, and many more have not yet been cataloged or have been incorrectly cataloged by traders.

Only species listed under Quotes (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) are followed, “but these represent only a very small fraction of the tarantula species in trade,” explains Carol Fukushima, tarantula taxonomist and researcher at Bison laboratory at the University of Turku in Finland. “Many are sold and transported without permits or records through methods such as brownboxing, where specimens are shipped illegally, mislabeled or transported as not wildlife to avoid detection,” she says .

Fukushima says there are also likely discrepancies in the naming and identification of species in the illegal market, further confusing the true impact of the trade. “See the case of Chilobrachys natanisharummarketed for years under the name “Electric Blue Tarantula”, but only scientifically described in 2023,” she explains.