More than 3,000 tarantulas have been seized at Jorge Chavez International Airport in Lima, hidden inside dirty socks packed into three suitcases bound for Germany.
Peru's National Forestry and Wildlife Service, Serfor, said the spiders were found during an inspection and covered every stage of the animal's life, from eggs and hatchlings through to adults. They had been collected from several regions of the country. The seizure was reported by the AFP news agency, which spoke to Peruvian authorities on Thursday.
The luggage belonged to travellers preparing to fly to Germany. Two German citizens and a Polish citizen were detained by police specialising in environmental crimes, and Serfor said criminal proceedings would follow.
Cora Suarez, a wildlife control technician at Serfor, described how the consignment announced itself during the check. "We noticed that some of them were moving," she said. "There were small ones and large ones."
The commercial logic is straightforward. Suarez said a single tarantula can fetch around 500 euros in Europe, which put the potential value of this one trip at about 1.5 million euros.
Peru is a regular source for the trade. Interpol estimates the illegal traffic in wildlife to be worth around 20 billion dollars a year, and trafficking of this kind is among the main causes of biodiversity loss.
The packing itself was unremarkable, which was the point. A sock is opaque, soft and the single least interesting object in a suitcase, and three cases of them raise no question on a baggage belt.
It is worth being precise about how the consignment was actually detected. The socks were not searched for spiders. The cases were not opened on a tip about spiders. An inspector noticed that the luggage was not still.
This is a difficulty specific to the cargo. Every other category of smuggled goods has the decency to stay where it is put. Gold does not shift in the bag. Banknotes do not shift in the bag. A sock containing a tarantula shifts in the bag, and goes on shifting for the full duration of the inspection.
The consignment therefore reported itself, and did so in proportion to its size. Three thousand animals produce more movement than thirty. Scaling up the operation scales up the only signal that gives it away, which makes this a rare trade in which the ambitious shipment is the detectable one and the unprofitable shipment is safe.
Valuation runs along the same curve. At about 500 euros an animal, our analysts calculate that a single sock is worth several thousand euros and a single suitcase several hundred thousand, which makes these three cases the most valuable luggage to pass through the terminal that morning and also the most obvious.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has considered whether any packing method could have held, and concludes that there is only one. Three thousand tarantulas can be moved undetected on the day they agree to keep still. No such agreement is recorded.