The Human Cost of Amber
M
atthew Downen had never done anything like this before. In a hotel room in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, he watched as a dealer poured a bag of amber fossils onto a white towel spread over a desk.
The previous night, at the opening reception for the eighth International Conference on Fossil Insects, Arthropods, and Amber, Downen had gotten a tip from a friend: A guy here had spiders fossilized in amber, and he was looking for someone to take them.
Downen, a doctoral student in entomology at the University of Kansas, was initially ecstatic. Spiders for free? He had come to the meeting to present his research on spider diversity in ancient lake beds; more fossilized spiders could expand his findings. When he expressed his enthusiasm, he was quickly introduced to a large, jovial dealer named Jorge, who showed him a smartphone photo of a spider with an unusually long abdomen. “He was like, ‘We’ve got all kinds of amber,’” Downen recalls. Jorge told Downen that if he was interested, he should meet him the next morning at 8—and bring cash. Downen realized that this was a commercial transaction, not a spider free-for-all.
Downen, a baby-faced student who wears an array of jeweled spider-shaped earrings and brooches, knocked on the designated hotel-room door the next morning. His stomach was churning: The ATM in his hotel had been out of pesos that morning, so he had no cash for whatever was about to take place. He was worried that he would be embarrassed, or that Jorge would be angry with him.
Once inside the room, Downen used a jeweler’s loupe to peer at the pieces of thumbnail-size golden amber scattered on the towel. He heard a knock at the door, and was surprised when a well-known entomologist entered carrying a bag of samples he had decided not to buy. That entomologist was followed by several more, all of whom seemed to know Jorge. As Downen listened to their orderly, friendly transactions, he separated out the four blocks of amber that interested him most. Each contained a striking fossilized Dominican spider, legs curved beneath its body. He then asked to see the unusual spider he’d glimpsed on Jorge’s cellphone the previous night.
That spider was stored in a separate box. Suspended in about one cubic inch of amber, its elongated abdomen looked like a twig. Downen immediately recognized the type from its living relatives, and he knew the long-extinct species hadn’t been previously described. A single specimen could earn him a new publication—a sought-after accolade for a graduate student. But the price? Jorge quoted him $15,000. On Downen’s student budget, there was no way.
Downen and Jorge turned back to the samples on the desk. “$50 per spider,” Downen recalls Jorge saying. “You only want four? You don’t
