Reliability of social media data in monitoring the global pet trade in ants.

The global pet trade is a major risk to biodiversity and humans. Over the recent decades, the pet trade has become increasingly globalized, diversified, digitalized and extremely difficult to control. With billions of Internet users posting online daily, social media could serve as a powerful surveillance tool. But it is still unknown how reliable social media are to track the global pet trade. Here, focusing on the emerging pet trade in ants (Hymenoptera, Formicidae), we show that social media data (∼38,000 posts from Instagram) identify the countries involved in the pet trade and reflect the taxonomic composition and commercial success of traded ant species. Moreover, Instagram data accurately estimated the overrepresentation of invasive species among traded species. Overall, our findings show that social media provide affordable and reliable data for monitoring emerging pet trades and advocate for an easier access to these data in the future. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.