Hunting to the point of extinction?

[papilio28570]

Following was copied from another group of Lep enthusiasts. Opinions?

>
> Wow Harry, you are sticking your neck out. I said something about collection on the TILS list, (The International Lepidoptera Survey ) and got flamed, cursed and even threatened (!?). Some of these folks opined that a rare or small area species NEEDED to be collected, so we could "understand" them, and that no matter how limited the range or rare the population, no amount of collecting was going to hurt them, due to the population dynamics of insects.

(end of comment, response follows)

I am in the UK. This idea is a peculiarly American delusion. It is total and utter nonsense, nuttier than squirrel droppings.

First of all there IS an example in the UK of a day-flying moth that WAS hunted to extinction. It's extinction was actually predicted by the collectors of the day.

Secondly there are TWO known published examples of over 90%+ of a population of a butterfly being collected in a mark-release-recapture study in the UK.
There probably would be many many many more but the idea is so bizarre to those studying population dynamics that they probably have never seen the need
to document it.

Thirdly PROPER study of the population dynamics of insects very clearly DOES show how it is possible.

I really am sticking my neck out perhaps, but this is one delusion that needs to be tackled. It is a few fries short of a happy meal. to be blunt about it.

Incidentally, I am not an anti-collector, because I engage in studies of living butterflies that would be hampered by a ban on collecting.

I do wonder if some of the people who promote the idea that collecting can never harm a population actually ARE anti-collectors in disguise.
There is nothing worse than to promote a case with such daft ideas. It is a gift to opponents because it is so easy to show that it is wrong and that
the promoters of the idea lack proper knowledge of ecology.

Neil Jones
[e-mail]
www.butterflyguy.com

[Chris Grinter]

I think this sentiment is reactionary - by and large, out of the 12,000 species of Leps in the USA a miniscule percentage could be threatened with over collecting. For the most part we are deluged with hearing how collecting is bad by the likes of NABA/Glassburg. It's criminal in my mind that kids today can't create insect collections in Florida because 2 of the most common blues in that state are now federally protected. And so my gut reaction is to overreact and say things like butterflies can't be over collected - clearly that's false. (FYI wasn't me who said that on TILS)

Yes, collecting can harm populations, but I don't see any evidence that it's common enough here that serious action needs to be taken on a large scale. Of course, sensitive populations should be protected. No specimens of the Schaus's swallowtail should be collected (even though its probably the same thing as the butterfly in the Bahamas) because of how weakly they are hanging on in the keys. Habitat destruction plays 95% of the role in every single one of these extinctions. We slowly remove the habitat and poison the environment until only small populations are left. Then along comes a handful of unethical collectors and hammer the nail in the coffin by collecting 90% of the population. They should be prosecuted.

I think the comment about population dynamics means to say in general insects can sustain a much higher level of take because insects naturally exist at higher densities and have higher fecundity than vertebrates. Most females taken have already been laying eggs. In my mind the commenter above couldn't have meant that pop-dynamics shows it's impossible. Nothing is impossible - we wiped out not only the passenger pigeon that was perhaps the most common bird on earth, but we managed to eradicate the Rocky Mountain locust that had previously existed at plague levels.

I know of some people who do actually believe it's impossible to make an insect extinct. But just like the climate change deniers, they end up marginalized by our community. I would say 100% of actual entomologists I know understand the need for the protection of rare species.

[rayrard]

It seems like it almost any case, if a butterfly species is so rare/fragmented in range that a collector can exterminate it, then that species was already doomed to extinction (collectors or no collectors).

Yeah, a colony with strict protection can hang on for years and years, but the species needs to spread out and occupy new territory if it ever wants to survive random natural disasters. Whether it will go extinct today or 100 years from now is due to many factors, but more the environment and natural predation (not human collectors). Collectors need to be ethical and recognize the protected species, and also the known colonies of species they have discovered, and not collect from those vulnerable colonies.

I often wonder if say a population of a rare species, like the Regal Fritillary at Ft. Indiantown, was suddenly released from protection. If the PA population was suddenly public land and open to insect collecting, would a flood of collectors go there and overcollect? Would a few collectors come? No collectors? One wonders that if the habitat was managed the exact same way yet collecting was permitted, if the Regal Fritillary population would be wiped out.

I really don't know the total collector biomass in the U.S. I haven't seen many in the field in my area, and both of them I knew already from academia.

[wingedwishes]

Or allow monitored farming / collecting. If a protected Ornithoptera were farmed with the condition that a percentage be released to populate the shrinking niche, money would go into governmental coffers, a breeders pocket, and a butterfly could become available again rather than being poached. I say greed should be used to help rather than hurt a species.

[wingedwishes]

"I am in the UK. This idea is a peculiarly American delusion. It is total and utter nonsense, nuttier than squirrel droppings."

At first I thought that proper Englishmen do not communicate in this manner but then realized he is in the UK rather than from the UK.

[saturniidave]

Well I AM in the U.K., and I have not heard of any species being overcollected to extinction. The cases of Large Coppers and Large Blues often quoted were doomed from habitat destruction anyway, maybe unscrupulous 19th century collectors didn't help, but they would have disappeared sooner or later with or without collectors.
I would love to know which day-flying moth the guy is going on about, I am not aware of any driven to extinction apart from by habitat changes.
Yes, farming, or captive breeding, would solve a lot of problems. Even the rare fritillary quoted above would benefit. If collectors took a few gravid females, bred them, kept a few back for their collections and released the rest it would be a win-win situation. But as such species are protected by law it won't happen.

[somewhatpeculiar]

I've read research papers that suggest that after a metapopulation are below a certain size (individuals and populations) it's doomed to extinction within some years. Unless very actively protected of course. Collection may speed up the process but other reasons such as habitat loss must be much worse.

Of course it's a delusion that it would help a species that you kill them and place their bodies in drawers at home. Nowadays with photos, national insect databases and internet collecting and labling insects are no excuse either. If it ever was.

Purchasing and collecting bred butteflies is a bit different. In the long run without an economical incitament to keep butterflies alive I'm not sure there will exist much of them (due to continous habit loss).

[jshuey]

Two things are worth commenting on because they seem to justify going ahead and collecting specimens even when you know it might have a negative impact -

1 -"It seems like it almost any case, if a butterfly species is so rare/fragmented in range that a collector can exterminate it, then that species was already doomed to extinction (collectors or no collectors)."

2 -"I've read research papers that suggest that after a metapopulation are below a certain size (individuals and populations) it's doomed to extinction within some years. Unless very actively protected of course."


First a general comment. - in an ecological sense, species per say, do not become extinct. Extinction is a population level thing. Eventually, if conditions get bad enough, the last population of a species can become extinct, and at that point the species is extinct as well. Collectors who make the "collecting isn't a threat to the species" generally ignore the cumulative impact of population loss. Hence, there is little difference in their minds between collecting from a large, secure population relative to a small wetland habitat fragment that may be the only habitat within miles. On the other hand, militant watchers often focus on the "local impacts" of collecting and ignore the bigger picture. For them there is little difference between collecting a widespread, weedy Vanessa species versus a host-specific wetland butterfly in a 3-acre fen.

Neither view point is intellectually honest.

Back to the two things worth commenting on..., -

Number 1 - seems like a fatalistic view. Here in Indiana, the regal fritillary was reduced to a single site when I moved here 20 years ago. You would see about10 individuals per day at most. Some years - I did not see any adults in day-long visits to the site. It was a minimalistic metapopulation with two patches of habitat located about 1/2 mile apart.

It's existence was kept a "state secret" - largely because females were very easy to find in common milkweed patches along at road at the site. Collecting could certainly have had a pretty significant impact if someone took a handful of females early in the season (unlike many butterflies, females of this species do not lay eggs for several weeks after emergence)

Since then, a major prairie restoration has been implemented and the butterfly now seems secure. It is still functionally a single metapopulation, but it occupies several thousand acres across a bi-state landscape, with many occupied habitat patches. I'd be inclined to say that it is moving away from a metapopulation structure, and into a more stable patchy population across a complex landscape.

The site is no longer a "state secret" and watchers and collectors visit the area to see and sample the population. The point is that very small populations can indeed be salvaged if someone or some group is willing to devote some work towards that end.

Number 2 is more straight forward. As mentioned above, extinction is a population level phenomenon. And with traditional metapopulations, it is assumed that EVERY local population will at some point become extinct. Metapopulations are maintained by recolonization rates that equal to or exceed extinction rates. So writing off an individual population as doomed is likewise fatalistic. There may well be "rescue" events from nearby populations, or as the habitat declines, the remaining individuals may disperse outward to find and found new colonies in new habitats.

I think its important to understand that this is actually a pretty complex issue, and that we, as collectors, have some obligation to think about our potential negative impacts and to act accordingly.

Shuey

[jonathan]

I believe that if a species is doomed for extinction, unless their population expands on new grounds, then sooner or later it will get extinct. Collectors can quicken the process but imagine if no one collected the Large Copper or the Large Blue in the UK 150 years ago. Surely both species would have had the same faith probably during the same period because their extinction was based on the change in their micro climate. How can we know what the specimens looked like if no one ever collected these species?

However I believe that we collectors should use what I call "common sense" and don't collect literally everything. For example when I go for collecting, I never ever collect a specimen which has large parts of its wings missing even though this might be rare, or it's not at least an A1- quality. And I have been doing this procedure on certain populations for years and I have never effected the populations by a dent. In fact this year I noticed that their was a boom in these butterfly populations. If we collectors leave at least a sufficient amount of insects to keep the population healthy then collecting will never harm a population. I think it's all about RESPONSIBILITY.

When I hear someone saying that collectors harm populations, that would be an evidence that such individuals are anti-collectors and like all fundamentalists, they are one-track minded. Once, long time ago, I had an argument with a lady who didn't stop telling me that my hobby destroys nature and the world and that she was a vegan to safe-guard the animal world. Ironically, she was saying this and at the same time smoking a cigarette and since I don't smoke my concluding remarks were simple...If I have a thousand specimens in my collection, it is true that I killed a thousand animal beings but people like you who smoke are killing the entire world with the chemicals found in your cigarette. If she wanted to save the world, she should have first led by example. Believe me that our friendship lasted for years and she never mentioned the argument again even though she used to come to my home very often .
btw, Sorry to all smokers but that's the truth.