It sucks being a bat in the Anthropocene, or as some would have it, the Capitalocene.
Climate crisis-fuelled extreme heat is killing bats in droves. The wind power infrastructure being built to limit global warming is causing bat mortality too, although there are ways to minimise this.
You name it, human-caused habitat loss, diseases, food shortages, bats are up against it all.
Exploitation is another threat to bats, including for the fashioning of their dead bodies into house décor. This trade is the focus of a recent study, which tracked listings of dead bat décor on three major e-commerce sites. The paper focused on the trading of Asia’s Painted Woolly Bat in particular.
The researchers found hundreds of listings, with dead bats sold as standalone taxidermied corpses and stuffed into picture frames. Perhaps the most macabre format they found was dead bats laid out in coffins. This may be the most grimly apt representation of the Painted Woolly Bat because without regulation of the trade, it could help to send the species to its grave.
A snapshot of trade
The European Journal of Wildlife Research published the study on 9 July. Authored by members of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Bat Trade Working Group, the paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of ornamental trade in a bat species. However, researchers have been voicing concerns about the bat curio trade since at least 2015.
The study’s focus species is Kerivoula picta, otherwise known as the Painted Woolly Bat. A small, solitary species with striking orange and black colouring, the bat lives in parts of South, East, and Southeast Asia. Like most bats, it only produces one offspring at a time, meaning the species is slow-growing and vulnerable to pressures, such as exploitation.
The researchers used data mining and manual searches to find ornamental bats on offer to US consumers on Amazon, Etsy, and eBay, between October and December 2022, before honing in on the Painted Woolly Bat.
They found 856 dead bat décor listings on the e-commerce platforms across the three-month period. Of these, 215 listings involved Painted Woolly Bats, which together amounted to at least 284 individual bats. US sellers accounted for 62 percent of the total dead bat listings, with vendors across some 30 states in all.
As Nistara Randhawa, co-lead on the paper and UC Davis data scientist and epidemiologist, stressed:
These bats are not from the United States, but they’re being sourced from across Asia and then brought here and used as décor.
The authors said that it was impossible to be exact in their count of individual bats for sale. The reasons for this included that sellers may have replenished stocks in between researchers’ searches of the sites and that the number of bats involved in listings was generally “unknowable.” They emphasised that the count undoubtedly “vastly underrepresents the volume of trade.”
Joanna Coleman, assistant professor at CUNY-Queens College and co-lead on the paper, commented:
We’re talking about 284 distinct individuals found over just a three-month period. That doesn’t include all the others sold on websites and physical shops year-round across the world.
Trade may be devastating
The IUCN Red List assessed the Painted Woolly Bat as Near Threatened in 2019 because its population was suspected to have declined globally by around 25 percent over the preceding 15 years. The assessment pointed to hunting of the species to feed the demand for souvenirs and ornaments as a leading cause of its population decline and predicted further trade-related decreases in the coming years.
However, there is a lack of comprehensive population data available for the bat, the study highlighted. Indeed, although the Painted Woolly Bat is considered to be uncommon, it appears to be unknown whether this reflects the species’ rarity or just inadequate surveying of it, according to the Red List assessment.
Nonetheless, considering that these “bats are quite scarce on landscapes,” Coleman said the authors are concerned “hunters might be systematically going out and removing every individual they see.”
Just as the overall population picture for the species is unclear, so too is the scale of trade in their lives. Dr Chris R. Shepherd, executive director of Monitor Conservation Research Society and co-author of the paper, tells The 4 Percent:
The actual scale of the trade, and the damage it has done to the overall population of this species is unknown. However, given the species is already threatened by habitat loss and possibly other issues, trade may be devastating.
This situation, whereby no-one really knows enough about the status of a species or the scale of trade in their lives to understand the impact of exploitation, is not exclusive to the Painted Woolly Bat. It’s played out with countless species across the world, due to inadequate regulation.
Shepherd says that an absence of regulation is particularly common for trade in lesser known species. "It is these species that often are most threatened and in need of immediate protection," he warns.
Regulation needed
In theory, the Painted Woolly Bat does enjoy certain protections. Hunting the bat is effectively illegal across most of its range due to national laws and provisions, according to the study. This means that many of the curio trades are “likely illegal” too, the authors said.
But the origin of bats in the listings, meaning where they were hunted, was entirely unclear, according to the researchers. This is linked to the fact that international trade in the species is not currently regulated. In other words, this potentially devastating trade is presently free to operate in the dark.
The situation empowers sellers to make unsubstantiated claims to attract buyers, such as characterising bat curios as ethically and sustainably sourced. Some sellers, for instance, claimed that bats in their listings were bred in captivity, despite captive breeding of insectivorous bats, such as the Painted Woolly Bat, being unfeasible, the authors said.
They stressed that “bat farms are nonexistent,” meaning “these bats were hunted.”
To bring some oversight to the trade, the authors recommended that the Painted Woolly Bat be included in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
CITES is the treaty body tasked with protecting the species under its watch from overexploitation in global trade. It currently regulates international trade in some 40,900 wild species of threatened plants and animals,
The CITES regulatory system contains numerous inadequacies and is ripe for reform itself, as I reported in The Revelator earlier this year. However, it is the principal way for cross-border trade in species to be subject to at least some monitoring and controls.
"Putting in place measures to prevent the trade in importing countries, such as the US, is also critical," says Shepherd. To this end, Monitor Conservation Research Society teamed up with the Center for Biological Diversity in May to file a legal petition. It called on US officials to list the Painted Woolly Bat as threatened or endangered under the country’s Endangered Species Act, which would lead to prohibitions on trade in the species.
At the time, Dianne DuBois, a staff scientist at the Center, said:
Painted Woolly Bats should be flying free in their native forests, not nailed to a wall in the United States.
Likewise, the study stressed that though traditional practice within many cultures, including among Indigenous Peoples, involves “harvesting wildlife for ornamental uses,” the trading of bats to sell them online and elsewhere “exemplifies the modern commodification of wildlife,” not cultural use.
“We refute any assertion that the online bat trade is ethical,” the authors wrote.
Let the bats be
Exploitation of wild species is among the top threats to biodiversity, according to various reports and studies. Trade-related harms have ramifications beyond individual species’ survival because living organisms do not exist in a vacuum. Speaking about why protecting bats is important, Randhawa said:
Bat populations are declining worldwide, and K. picta is but one of the many unique bat species affected by ongoing global biodiversity loss.
They are incredibly important to protect, not least because of the vital ecosystem services bats provide.
The ecosystem services provided by bats include seed dispersal and pollination. Bats also contribute to disease control, by preying on organisms like mosquitos.
On the other hand, some wild animals, including bats, harbour zoonotic diseases. These are diseases that can be transmitted between humans and other animals. The wildlife trade increases the risk of zoonotic disease spread, the study highlighted. This is because the trade necessarily involves people and wildlife being in very close proximity with each other. Moreover, it subjects wild individuals to stressful situations where they may be more likely to shed pathogens.
Relatedly, other research published in April found that bat diversity is key to limiting the spread of zoonotic diseases like coronaviruses, meaning it’s beneficial for human health if the flying mammals are left to thrive undisturbed.
Of the bat species assessed by the IUCN Red List, around a third are endangered or of unknown conservation status, due to a lack of data. Considering this and the host of worsening threats they face, bats could do with some relief.
Safeguarding them from unsustainable trade would allay some pressure from one of the key threats they are grappling with, namely exploitation. Without controls on trade, the ornaments displaying their tiny bodies in coffins could turn out to be harbingers of the grim fate that awaits species like the Painted Woolly Bat.
Dearest Tracy. Thank you for this shocking piece. Is there no end to animal exploitation?! And thank you for your phenomenal journalism and advocacy of animals. Like it or not, and the planet really doesn’t like it, but ethical veganism for ALL animals both human and non human, really is the ‘moral baseline.’
It's shocking how people are so desperate to exploit animals and the lengths we will go, regardless of the effect that has on the viability of the animals in the wild and their ecosystems