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Paper short abstract

An analysis of tensions in knowledge production among Australian invertebrate keepers, particularly the risk that democratised knowledge can enable poaching and the strategic use of ignorance to similar effect. Indigenous modes of knowing the land further complicate these dynamics.

Paper long abstract

The global community of pet invertebrate keepers is geographically dispersed but connected through international trade and social media. New species, and, in the case of taxa difficult to breed in captivity, new individuals, enter the hobby largely through collectors and poachers extracting animals from the wild.

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research in Australia, Poland, Thailand, and Singapore, this paper examines how knowledge about species, habitats, and care practices is produced, circulated, withheld, and contested within Australian invertebrate keeping. Terraristic expertise emerges from heterogeneous regimes of knowledge, combining fragments of scientific literature with experimentation and embodied practice. Knowledge is actively managed—sometimes treated as a collective good, sometimes guarded as private property. At the same time, ignorance is strategically cultivated, for example through claims that poaching rare endemic species is justified because their restricted distribution cannot be conclusively proven.

The paper focuses on citizen science platforms such as iNaturalist and the Atlas of Living Australia. While designed to democratize ecological knowledge, these tools are increasingly used by poachers to locate rare and valuable species, making the democratised knowledge a source of ecological harm. In response, some actors refuse to publish precise locality data.

Analysis incorporating Indigenous epistemologies further complicates these dynamics, revealing knowledge as relational, situated, and contingent on gender and social positionality. I argue that these tensions expose competing models of environmental expertise and reframe polarisation as negotiation over responsibility, epistemic authority, and multispecies coexistence.