Press Releases July 16 2024

Flushing, NY, July, 16, 2024—Queens College researcher Joanna Coleman, has co-led the first comprehensive study of the international ornamental trade in wild bats and has found that one species is potentially threatened by sales of taxidermied specimens to consumers in the United States in online marketplaces, especially eBay and Etsy. The study, Dying for décor: Quantifying the online, ornamental trade in a distinctive bat species, Kerivoula picta, published July 9 in the European Journal of Wildlife Research, focuses on the painted wooly bat Kerivoula picta (K. picta) a tiny, insect-eating, increasingly commodified species from South, East, and Southeast Asia. It is marked by unusually striking orange fur and black and orange wings. Working within a global supply chain that begins with the (most likely illegal) hunting of bats in “source countries” where they live, U.S. vendors import K. picta, marketing and selling the framed and mounted bodies online as home décor, jewelry, and personal ornaments.

Coleman—a Queens resident, who was born in Montréal—is an assistant professor of biology at Queens College and co-chair of the Bat Trade Working Group, part of the Bat Specialist Group within the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and its Species Survival Commission (IUCN SSC). She co-led the study with Nistara Randhawa, a UC Davis data scientist and epidemiologist.

“This team of scientists has conducted groundbreaking research on the online trade in wild bats, which is largely avoiding official oversight,” says Queens College President Frank H. Wu. “Our faculty at Queens College have long been known for their innovative work in conservation biology and their support for sustainable development—areas where Professor Coleman is making significant contributions in partnership with scientists and institutions in several countries. This study rings the alarm for biodiversity, showing us that threats to wildlife have an international scope, benefit from international scientific collaboration, and must be addressed without delay.”

Bats, which are the second most species-rich order of mammals, play vital ecological roles around the world—as pollinators, insect eaters, and seed dispersers. However, they are often killed as “pests” that eat crops, are harvested for medicinal purposes, and suffer from ongoing habitat loss. Increasingly, bat populations are also in decline due to the global wildlife trade. In 2020 the IUCN named K. picta a near-threatened species on its Red List of Threatened Species, with trade as the suspected main cause of an estimated population decline of 25 percent.

Coleman believes the threat is urgent. “It’s very important to remember that our data-collection period was only three months. Meanwhile this is going on on dozens of websites and in physical shops worldwide, so it’s only the tip of the iceberg. I’m genuinely concerned that what might be happening is that the hunters are going out into the habitats where the bats live and systematically removing every single individual that they encounter. There’s a risk that the population could be depleted. We need to do something immediately.”

As the authors point out, the scale of exploitation could expand, endangering K. picta even further. They suggest that imports of K. picta should be subject to greater enforcement of wildlife laws in the United States. The Lacey Act forbids importation of any illegally harvested wildlife. Because taxidermied wildlife pose a potential biosecurity hazard, importers also should obtain a permit from the Centers for Disease Control. Moreover, the global scale of the trade suggests the need for international action. The authors recommend that K. picta be reassessed and listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a multilateral agreement that would prohibit its transboundary trade. The research team is already conducting a follow-up study in Vietnam that will explore the supply chain in greater depth, potentially supporting a recategorization of K. picta at the next CITES conference in 2025.

Further, the study finds a pattern of misleading appeals to conscious consumption. About 20% of sales copy implies or promises that the dead bats are ethically sourced—meaning that they were bred in captivity, died of natural causes, and were not harmed. The scientists reject these claims, arguing that because there is no captive-breeding program for insect-eating bats, in practical terms they must be taken from the wild, violating wildlife laws in the source countries. Equally important, K. picta reproduces at a very slow rate—removing individuals from the breeding population has unsustainable impacts on the future of the species. Finally, it would not be possible to find enough bats who died from natural causes in the wild and remained in saleable condition to grow this trade ethically.

The trade in K. picta thrives under the radar, in both source and destination countries, even as it expands into new markets (such as the goth subculture targeted in nearly 15% of K. picta listings). This study relies on a resourceful multimethod approach to uncover a trade somewhat hidden behind private entities and lack of robust official monitoring (for example, attempts to use the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s database on wildlife imports were not fruitful as its data do not identify bats in the genus Kerivoula to the species level). The team’s research strategy combined semiautomated searches and manual data collection of online marketplaces, text analysis, and statistical data analysis. The researchers quantified the trade over a three-month period from October 2022 to December 2022. They found 856 listings for bats, of which 215—representing 284 individuals—were for K. picta.

“Conservation biology has core tenets—namely, that biodiversity is good, and that animals have the inherent right to exist independently of whatever the species do that benefits humans,” reflects Coleman. “Having caused this biodiversity crisis that we’re in, which rivals any of the previous five mass-extinction events, it’s our responsibility to fix it.” She adds, “This is the most concrete and tangible project that I’ve ever been involved in. It’s already resulted in a petition to add Kerivoula picta to the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and there’s now a petition in Australia to ban the import of taxidermied bats. It’s picking up steam, and that is tremendously rewarding.”

The study identifies an emerging supply chain extending from source countries (like Indonesia and others in the region) to Europe and North America—“a considerable movement of biodiversity into the global North,” says Coleman. Though K. picta is a solitary species, harder to find than bats that live in colonies, it represents a substantial one-quarter of the online listings of bats. The study also shows that eBay and Etsy dominate the online sale of bats, with potentially amplified impacts due to vendors’ links to social media like Instagram. Most online sellers of bats are in the United States; vendors in numerous states sell the taxidermied bodies of K. picta, with pricing affected by extras like artistic framing, mounting onto hair ornaments, and similar embellishments.

Lead author Coleman is an ecologist who has published widely, including as coeditor of Urban Bats: Biology, Ecology, and Human Dimensions (Springer). Before coming to Queens College in 2021, she taught at the National University of Singapore and the University of Calgary in Qatar. She holds a BSc in environmental biology from McGill University, an MSc in renewable resources from McGill, and a PhD in urban wildlife ecology from the University of Calgary. Of the five working groups of the Bat Specialty Group within IUCN SSC, she co-chairs two, including the Human Dimensions Working Group.

Second author Nistara Randhawa (University of California at Davis) has now joined the Bat Trade Working Group. All other authors were already members of the Bat Trade Working Group of IUCN SSC. They are Joe Chun-Chia Huang (National Taiwan Normal University), Tigga Kingston and Abigail L. Rutrough (Texas Tech University), Benjamin P. Y.-H. Lee (Singapore Botanic Gardens), Joy M. O’Keefe (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Vu Dinh Thong (Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology), Susan M. Tsang (American Museum of Natural History), and Chris R. Shepard, co-chair of the Bat Trade Working Group and executive director of the Canadian non-profit Monitor Conservation Research Society. This research was funded by the Animal Welfare Institute in Washington, D.C.

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