KABUL: The trade of scorpion hunting in Afghanistan, though unregistered, has been around for years but has become a lucrative business in the past few months.
A local dealer from western Herat province said Herat and neighboring Farah, with vast scorching deserts, have become the common hunting ground for shepherds and poor local residents who spend hours and sometimes days trying to catch scorpions.
Scorpions are in high demand for medical research, scorpion smoking and other uses. Its venom is used to develop compounds for anti-cancer medicines while it is a popular street-food snack in many countries, including China.
Requesting anonymity while talking to Arab News, the dealer explained that the invertebrates can cost an average of hundreds of dollars while one weighing 60 grams was sold for as much as $120,000. It all depends on the size of the scorpion and the broker’s offer, he said. “The final price of the scorpion increases with a hike in the number of brokers.”
The weight of the scorpion matters because, according to Khan, those weighing more than 40 grams have a longer life expectancy.
Scorpions hunted in neighboring Farah are brought to Herat city where local dealers compete with each other to find a foreign buyer for their merchandise. The buyers are often Chinese, Arab and Iranian nationals who take them out of the country for medical research and consumption purposes, the dealer told Arab News from Herat by phone.
“It has become a new lucrative business for the past few months now. In the old days we used to kill them (black scorpions) because they are very deadly, now we are chasing to find one,” he said.
While the trade is legal in parts of Pakistan, the authorities in Afghanistan are still considering whether to curb the practice, adding to the fear of local dealers who are avoiding being coerced into giving away their foreign buyers.
“The transaction is conducted in the underground or on social media,” said the dealer.
An investigative reporter for a local Kabul daily bought a 10 gram scorpion for $1,000 from a local dealer in Herat, disguising himself as a frontman for a foreign pharmaceutical firm, Hashte Sobh said in its May 29 edition.
Smuggling scorpions is easy as the creature is tough and can last in a hot climate, surviving in covered boxes without food for several weeks.
Lawmakers from the region have expressed their concern over the trade, especially its impact on the ecosystem.
A spokesman for Herat’s governor, Jailani Farhad, confirmed that the trade was taking place and said the authorities were looking into it.
“We are collecting facts and looking into legalities on whether such kind of trade of a rare type of insect is illegal or not. Instructions have been given to the local authorities in this regard,” Farhad told Arab News.
Kazim Humayoun, a Kabul-based ecological expert, said that Afghanistan has compiled a “Red List” that bars hunting and smuggling of 148 species of animals, birds and insects.
“There are species that have gone extinct and some are on the verge of extinction. The falcons here and another bird named Dogh Dogh have also been key attractions for local and Arab hunters in the past,” he said.
There is a high demand for scorpion venom, especially in the US and Europe, where — according to a report published in the Wall Street Journal — the product is sold for $39 million a gallon.
Black scorpion smuggling in Afghanistan is big business
Black scorpion smuggling in Afghanistan is big business
- Black scorpions can cost on average hundreds of dollars; one weighing 60 grams was sold for as much as $120,000, according to a local Herat dealer.
- The final price of the scorpion increases with a rise in the number of brokers.
Three-year heatwave bleached half the planet’s coral reefs: study
PARIS: A study published on Tuesday showed that more than half of the world’s coral reefs were bleached between 2014-2017 — a record-setting episode now being eclipsed by another series of devastating heatwaves.
The analysis concluded that 51 percent of the world’s reefs endured moderate or worse bleaching while 15 percent experienced significant mortality over the three-year period known as the “Third Global Bleaching Event.”
It was “by far the most severe and widespread coral bleaching event on record,” said Sean Connolly, one the study’s authors and a senior scientist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
“And yet, reefs are currently experiencing an even more severe Fourth Event, which started in early 2023,” Connolly said in a statement.
When the sea overheats, corals eject the microscopic algae that provides their distinct color and food source.
Unless ocean temperatures return to more tolerable levels, bleached corals are unable to recover and eventually die of starvation.
“Our findings demonstrate that the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs are accelerating, with the near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems,” said the study in the journal Nature Communications.
An international team of scientists analyzed data from more than 15,000 in-water and aerial surveys of reefs around the world over the 2014-2017 period.
They combined the data with satellite-based heat stress measurements and used statistical models to estimate how much bleaching occurred around the world.
No time to recover
The two previous global bleaching events, in 1998 and 2010, had lasted one year.
“2014-17 was the first record of a global coral bleaching event lasting much beyond a single year,” the study said.
“Ocean warming is increasing the frequency, extent, and severity of tropical-coral bleaching and mortality.”
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, for instance, saw peak heat stress increase each year between 2014 and 2017.
“We are seeing that reefs don’t have time to recover properly before the next bleaching event occurs,” said Scott Heron, professor of physics at James Cook University in Australia.
A major scientific report last year warned that the world’s tropical coral reefs have likely reached a “tipping point” — a shift that could trigger massive and often permanent changes in the natural world.
The global scientific consensus is that most coral reefs would perish at warming of 1.5C above preindustrial levels — the ambitious, long-term limit countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Global temperatures exceeded 1.5C on average between 2023-2025, the European Union’s climate monitoring service, Copernicus, said last month.
“We are only just beginning to analyze bleaching and mortality observations from the current bleaching event,” Connolly told AFP.
“However the overall level of heat stress was extraordinarily high, especially in 2023-2024, comparable to or higher than what was observed in 2014-2017, at least in some regions,” he said.
He said the Pacific coastline of Panama experienced “dramatically worse heat stress than they had ever experienced before, and we observed considerable coral mortality.”
