That was my idea for birds too once a vagrant was caught in a trap, you can spend some time and make perfect shots with line of all feather rows and take blood and feather sample, no need to kill it, but no, they can’t do that because “it’s a common species in its range” as if it really could change anything.
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@lisapaloma Holy smokes! When you said “Last century” I thought you were being ironic. I just now realized that it’s accurate. For me too. Yet it only seems like yesterday…
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I’m not ideologically opposed but I have no idea how I’d go about doing it in a meaningful sense either; from getting permits to depositing voucher specimens with an institution that actually wants them, to the physical preparation.
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For most bird species in most places, we’ve got enough specimens in museums and just processing those found dead will take up more time than we have. (Not for all of them!)
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We don’t know what people will want in the future. DNA and photos are great, but people also use museum samples to measure changes in environmental levels of chemicals. DNA + photos won’t do that. And what will people want in another 100 years? We still need specimens. Not a lot of them for some species, but a few.
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Won’t samples stored correctly preserve that information too? I mean blood + feathers. Not something a regular person will do, but a museum/lab storage could easily accomplish.
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In 2000 I was at a meeting - speaker said - we were born in the middle of the last century - and she shocked all of us!
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Preserved specimens in a public museum collection (such as at many university biology departments) are necessary for many areas of research: phylogenetics/systematics, diet, reproduction, disease, parasites, toxins, etc. Photos are good but they don’t provide the information that a physical specimen can. I can’t speak to private collections, such as for insects, since I’ve never made one. During my college days, where I was employed in a research collection, I did my share of collecting and preserving specimens of a wide range of animal taxa. That was certainly required in the various “-ology” classes I took, although my understanding is that collecting/killing specimens is no longer required of most modern undergraduate classes. I still see the value in collecting physical specimens although in more recent years I’ve moved away from that activity and turned more to photography. But I realize that when I take a photo of some organism and leave it to go on its way, I’m only documenting a very small part of what it can tell us. But I’m okay with that.
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Beautifully said! Many of these responders talk about their personal education, not to make a definitive report which would be accepted as truth in a peer-reviewed journal.
Photographs are so much better-- and few take the time to learn about optics, and how to highlight important structures. I now have an on-the-go digital microscope that does a better job than any dissecting scope I’ve ever used.
Almost across the board: no need to kill to identify. And thinking (during this anthropocene age) that we have the right to kill things if they lack a nervous system, shows a profound misapprehension by that nervous system of the roles played in the interconnected web of life on earth.
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A point that might be missing in this thread: the information that provides the foundation to the iNaturalist database, including the taxonomy (and underlying systematics), much of the natural history information, and much of our understanding of species distributions, is based on physical specimens that were collected and, yes, killed for research purposes. Photos have only recently become a stand-in for specimens for certain narrow purposes, such as documenting distribution or, in some cases, morphological variation.
I recognize that individuals may choose to not collect and sacrifice specimens in their study of nature; that’s a personal choice and I understand it. But we shouldn’t forget that specimen collecting has a long history, has provided information that we all use, and is still needed today to answer a lot of the questions we still have about organisms.
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…
Why?
(genuinely curious to hear perspectives around this)
To me the importance we place on vertebrates as society just seems totally biased.
Isn’t it largely just down to taxonomical proximity to ourselves?
Observing invertebrates in depth for the last two years, I just don’t really buy this delineation between vertebrates and invertebrates that society makes. Can one really deem the former of to be of more importance than the other?
Another aspect of this perception seems to be simply size.
e.g. Insects are smaller so we value them less.
But which of these is more important? The baby toad, or the adult dragonfly?
Or in the case of a whale is it also about longevity?
In which case, is a mite which lives 5 years more important than a mouse which only lives 3?
Or is it also about how endangered it is?
In which case, is a single endangered insect less ‘important’ than the life of a single endangered whale?
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It’s really about reproductive output (how many young are produced by a female in a given year), longevity and likelihood of survival of individuals, and the role of parental care. One dead whale is a greater impact to the sustainability of its species than one dead insect is to its species. Do a search on r-selected species vs. K-selected species if you’re curious.
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Sorry, I may have editted that after you responded.
But would you place more importance on the mouse or the mite i mentioned then?
If we just use the metric of K-selected vs R-selected then are coconut palms more important than some insects too?
Whilst this sounds like an interesting factor to consider, I don’t think that’s something the general public considers when they talk about whether or not they are ok to kill an invertebrate vs a vertebrate.
Don’t know anything about the mite and its reproductive capability. There’s a lot of variability even among mice species in their reproductive output although as a generality most produce large numbers of young in any given year. They are generally r-selected.
For any group of organisms, I should say that it’s really species-specific how sustainable the removal of individuals are from any given population.
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So you wouldn’t draw a clear delineation between taking vertebrate specimens vs taking invertebrate specimens?
It can be hard to find a “clear delineation” that applies 100% of the time in almost anything in biology.
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I put “important” in quotes for a reason. I also agree that we focus too much attention on vertebrates. However, the loss of a blue whale has more significance than the loss of a honey bee. When I was younger, I read a lot about animal rights philosophy, and quickly realised that their definition of importance was largely defined on human traits. I reject this. As I have said above, I believe that all life forms should be treated with the same respect. The ‘important’ categorization is aimed solely at endangered species, where the loss of one can mean a great deal to the species survival. I purposely did not include human life, because I think, as a species, we have demonstrated again and again that human life is not important.
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An endangered huge whale is more important because of this, not really like mite is living longer than mouse, whales have really hard time living in modern world, so it’s not just years of their lives that matter or their strategy alone.
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Absolutely. To a large extent you’re correct that we are generally more squeamish about killing vertebrates than non-vertebrates because they are more like us (that’s why we are drawn to animals with large eyes and small noses–because they look like our babies and we’re genetically programmed by natural selection to nuture our babies). I don’t think we can expect people to be complete rationalists (pretty obvious given how people behave in general). When pressed to rationalize beyond mere visual similarity, people tend to point out that vertebrates, in general, have more complex nervous systems and then argue from that observation that they have a greater sense of perception or cognition or awareness. But then one could ask why that matters (or if that’s even correct). Do you not feel more emotion when you squash a baby bird under foot than a baby mosquito? You’d be a strange human indeed if you didn’t. So the question becomes, must we all become Spocks and rid ourselves of emotion and rely only on logic when it comes to deciding what is OK to harm (including what we eat)? Salad anyone? Salad is a bowl of still-living organisms capable of sensing and responding to their environment. They die a slow death in our digestive tracts. As some have pointed out, those of us inclined to be Spocks can quantify reproductive strategies and population sizes to decide what the negative impact of harming an individual should be (defined as harm to the species). But that would be ignoring the harm due to suffering of the individual or the individual’s inherent right to remain alive. I can envision humans putting themselves in quiet a moral (and practical) predicament depending on which direction, and to what extent, we decided to take this line of reasoning. Fun for philosophizing, but once the lawyers and courts get involved, the fun stops.
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This topic seems to come up every year. The only practical con of collecting is the impact said activities may have on a population, especially one that is already stressed by other factors. Obviously, the amount of specimens taken is also an important variable.
The pros of collecting is that it provides a repository of information. DNA, close examination of characters, and information that defines a species in other senses too. Even if photographs are sufficient for ID, they do not replace the need for specimens and that is why describing new species insists on collection.
Besides that, I don’t touch on the argument of whether it’s moral to kill organisms, because that is not something I have a strong opinion on. There’s always pressure as a human being to put morality and ethics high above everything else. But I focus more on the importance of why something should be collected, rather than the moral reasoning, and I hope that people
can respect that opinion.
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I guess the topic is endless and comes back every now and than. Perhaps the problem is not separate ethics and sensibility. If you have a rat at home, most of the people will kill it and that’s not a problem, if you smash a dog on the same way, it’s horrible. In birds you can deal very deep with a good picture and a feather for DNA. In some beetles groups you need dissection to identify, and even more, night collecting make hard to selectively collect. Ethics would say, collect and kill if it is necessary. In Nicaragua, but also in other countries, agriculture kill millions of insects by aerial spray (not selective) and, no way, that’s the way to do it. If you have ants or mosquitoes coming in the house, you will probably kill them. So I consider entomologists as amateur serial killers, most farmers as professional serial killers. I do not study vertebrates, but here people kill snake preventively, just for the case they may be poisonous, and the herpetologists collegues are collecting and release after picture session.
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