Many butterfly collectors buy specimens on eBay
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Tens of thousands of butterflies are sold on eBay each year, and endangered species subject to trade restrictions command some of the highest prices, an analysis shows.
Zhengyang Wang at Harvard University and his colleagues tracked the sale of dead butterflies on eBay for a year from September 2020 by automating the search of 150,000 butterfly names — both current and historical — on the site.
The team recorded more than 50,000 transactions involving 3,767 species, nearly a fifth of all known butterfly species…