COS 109-3 - Just a click away: E-commerce as a growing pathway for aquatic invasive species

Abstract: Rapid expansion of internet connectivity and mobile technology has led to a fundamental transformation of the retail landscape. Sales of undomesticated aquatic animals as pets have rapidly expanded beyond ‘brick-and-mortar’ retail stores to include a growing number of internet marketplaces that provide more convenient purchasing and access to trendy, sometimes unique, species. In doing so, the internet has created opportunities for new and long-distance trade routes for live organisms and increased accessibility to new source pools of invasive species. Here, I explore how e-commence is an emerging, and ever growing, risk of species invasions. By systematically examining e-commerce websites in multiple languages across the world, this study identifies the wide diversity of freshwater animals currently associated with online marketplaces, explores the volume, economic value and geographic routes of pet trade, and evaluates the invasive risk of these species using statistical models. The results showed that at any one time, the online global pet trade involves hundreds of online marketplaces and tens of thousands of sale listings in >40 countries (5 continents) involving hundreds of fish, crayfish, and snails that represent a selling value in the millions USD. A globe analysis of one popular online marketplace revealed a vast network of geographic routes by which live organism are sold, thus demonstrating the highly diffuse and non-centralized nature of the online pet aquarium trade. With respect to freshwater crayfish, close to half (46%) of the online listings were selling species considered globally invasive. Particularly concerning is the convergence of desirability and invasibility of many nonnative crayfish species currently offered on e-commerce marketplaces. By combining geography pathways associated with online trade (introduction risk) and spatially-explicit modeling of habitat suitability (establishment risk), hotspots of invasion risk were mapped across the world. Precise characterization of the online pet trade market is fundamental to support the development of regulations and biosecurity policies to prevent trade in species invasions. This study reveals that the taxonomy, geography and economics of global online trade in freshwater animals is vast and requires greater attention.