Collecting Reminder

[The Snark]

Always respect protected animals and their environments, whether designated or not. For example, most of southern California has encroached on the environment so much it really should be designated critical wildlife habitat.
"I'm only going to take one or two specimens!" Chants the crowd of 10,000 weekend warriors - each and every weekend, year after year.
Sustainable wildlife populations depend on everyone acting responsibly. The entire planet is slowly moving towards threatened or endangered.

 

[Alien_Regalis]

This is a good point. I'm all for catch and release honestly. I don't see the need to do much collecting in the wild.

 

[Arthroverts]

You will be happy to see my local invertebrate club's collecting trip rules then I believe...

Thanks,

Arthroverts

 

[pannaking22]

If you own a home with a grassy yard you take care of or drive some sort of vehicle, you're doing significantly more damage to local insect populations than going out and collecting (minus of course species that are endangered or have specialized habitats that are greatly threatened, such as in southern California). Monoculture agriculture and urban sprawl will do more in a couple days than I could do in my entire life. And that's if I was going out daily and collecting literally everything.

I'm all for collecting, but I make sure that I disturb habitat as little as possible. Most of what I do anymore is sweeping or beating vegetation, with some rock flipping on occasion. If I do stumble across something threatened/endangered I give it a nod and let it go on its way. My goal is for it to seem like I was never there, unless you're out counting grasshoppers or beetles, then you may notice a few missing.

This last weekend trip I went on, I collected a whopping 128 specimens (I've got the box sitting in front of me because I'm working on IDing things), collecting from sunup to sundown, and I'm a bit of a generalist collector, so it's not like I was collecting only one taxon. I probably hit that many insects/spiders on my 15 minute drive to work this morning.

Doing this collecting gives us snapshot in time of when/where something was. Do I need to go out and collect 300 of a species of beetle? Realistically, no (though a debate could be made if it's a possibly cryptic species complex). Plus not everything can be IDed by a photo in the field, so a physical specimen nicely mounted on a pin/point/slide is necessary. How can we know what needs protection if we don't even know what we have? For example, a friend just collected a buprestid that's a new country record for the US in south Texas, and as a bonus he may have figured out the host plant as well. The area is slated to be used for houses and one of the fields that was full of the possible host plant is now gone. Too late in this case, yes, but now he's checking those plants every time he finds them for more specimens and evidence. Hopefully the paper will come out this year. Not that anyone is going to care about a little beetle when it comes to habitat conservation, but this is knowledge we didn't have before.

I caught a beetle last year that's now known globally from 5 specimens. It was an incredible find, and now we have more info on it. We have when it was caught, GPS coordinates of where it was caught, and I noted the flower it was on, so this is more data. I enjoyed the specimen in my collection for a bit, took some photos, and sent it on to an expert on the group since he's working on a key and needs that specimen. When he's done with it, I told him to place it in a museum collection where it belongs. As great as it was, it belongs in an official collection, not my personal one. Is this a species that needs protection? Probably, but how will we know without more data? I'd like to think there are more of that species tucked away in museum drawers somewhere, mixed in with similar species because the differences are subtle.

If you had 10,000 people going out every weekend in one area to collect, then I completely agree, it would be wrecked in no time. But if you have 10,000 scattered across a whole country/continent...? To be honest, there aren't a ton of major collectors in the world, so when you compare their efforts to the big businesses, plus the overarching tidal wave that's climate change, collectors are barely a drop in the bucket.