Online sales appear to be compounding threats from climate change and habitat loss, according to new research.
Some of the bright orange bats were framed in shadow boxes, their boldly striped wings spread wide. Others were mounted in miniature coffins with shiny fittings. A few were promoted as Halloween or Christmas gifts.
Bigger, more charismatic species like elephants and tigers usually come to mind when the illicit animal trade is mentioned. But a study published this month has revealed a flourishing black market in stuffed and mounted bats that, until now, has gone largely unnoticed. In the United States, especially, bats are openly sold, intact or as skeletons, on e-commerce sites like Etsy, eBay and Amazon.
“If people aren’t discerning, they might think they’re buying products that are sustainably sourced, but they’re not,” said Nistara Randhawa, an epidemiologist and data scientist at the University of California, Davis, and a co-author of the study, which appeared in The European Journal of Wildlife Research. “Instead, they could be inadvertently supporting the population decline of this bat species in the wild.”
Other researchers first noticed a worrisome number of bats for sale on eBay in 2014. Dr. Randhawa and her colleagues followed up on that observation with a more systematic study. From October to December 2022, they regularly searched for listings on eBay, Etsy and Amazon. Many types of bats appeared in the results, but they focused primarily on Kerivoula picta, a species from Asia known as the painted woolly bat or fire bat, because its distinctive orange fur and striped wings make it easy to identify.
In 2020, conservationists declared K. picta “near threatened” after determining that the overall population had very likely declined by up to 25 percent over the past 15 years. They cited online demand for specimens and skulls as one of the primary threats driving that decline.