Dear housecrows and all others,
Thank you for your feedback on our project, for forwarding it to our vespawatch mailbox and for the discussion on this forum.
Indeed, a lot of pictures are posted of European hornets beaten to death, also common and german yellowjacket, and rather rarely other species which are confused with Asian hornets by the public. I guess this could be a general issue when running surveys on any unpopular critter such as snakes, spiders, scorpions and the like. In general, we hope the awareness raising performed through our citizen science project and the management actions that result from the surveillance effort, outweigh the negatives of some collateral on native wasps and insects. Our target audience is the general public, and compared to the naturalists, there is a lot to be done there in terms of public support for insect conservation and knowledge about insect identification. As our target audience is mostly the general public (more than the trained naturalists that have mostly already found their way to the Belgian recording portal www.waarnemingen.be, we chose to additionally build a website which allows submitting records without mandatory registration but which syncs records to the iNaturalist Vespawatch account so data are openly available and can be validated.
A lot of points have been raised already in this discussion, but we wanted to add some further elements for clarification and consideration:
- firstly, the project is not in any way promoting the destruction of insects. On the contrary, Vespawatch’s main goal is to make people aware that there are several hornet species, make them aware about native wasps and their ecological significance and the impact of the invasive Asian hornet on biodiversity. So the “kill first, ID later” mentality is absolutely not what we are trying to achieve. In the bigger scale of things, we are also convinced non-target effects of management are important to consider when deciding on risk management options for invasive species.
- Since professional eradication services now make the distinction between the species, hornet nests are no longer indiscriminately destroyed which already saves an awful lot of insects on the whole (you could call this a positive spin-off of the invasion but the awareness on insects is already ongoing for a longer period of time).
- none of the species reported so far are legally protected in Flanders (north Belgium) with the exception of a (live) Libellula depressa
- Many of the dead insects would also unknowingly die in the living room without our project, we hope that through Vespawatch at least some members of the public will start IDing the species first.
- We aspire some members of the public will grow an interest and start using iNaturalist themselves.
- The recording module on our website is very visual and clearly shows the most confused species https://vespawatch.be/obs/add/. We considered a chatbot to help with identification but that was financially unfeasible for our project. The recording form also calls upon people “Please don’t kill insects unnecessarily” (although many people probably don’t read this).
- We give people feedback in case of an observation and call on them not to kill insects unnecessarily in the future.
- The impact of a few killed workers is probably negligible for social insects at both colonial and population level (not so for queens).
- We take the season into account when planning our communication in the press (which may lead to an upsurge in photos of killed insects) i.e. we only start our communication campaign late in the spring, when the Asian hornet is active and the probability of killing queens of European hornet is lower since they are already safely in the nest.
- Lastly: yes, of course we monitor observations, provide feedback to observers, try to build an active and engaged community (organizing ivy blitzes and nest searches, giving lectures and training etc.) and are very active in validating observations. We would also like to thank everyone who contributes to this effort!