Anti-Collectors

Watchers

Anti-collectors are almost always watchers – that is they observe insects like birdwatchers do birds. They generally keep lifetime lists (a carryover from birdwatching) and use close focusing binoculars and expensive digital cameras to record their observations. Not all watchers are anti-collecting though, in fact, I would say more than 50% are happy to spend time in the field with collectors and watchers alike.

Anti-Collectors

People who oppose insect collecting tend to fall into one of two general categories.

1. The first category are generally watchers who feel that we have now advanced to the point where collections are no longer necessary due to the advancement of the science of entomology. In essence, we know all we can know from collecting. While they are happy to have and use the data supplied by collectors from the past century, they feel that collectors no longer serve any purpose in the study of insects. There is a subgroup in this category composed of elitists that say only ‘professonals’ should be allowed to collect insects. This subgroup is almost entirely composed of academics who have formally studied entomology at some time in the long past. To them amateurs have or serve no purpose.

2. The second category are rabid anti-collectors who generally oppose collecting on moral or idealistic grounds. Generally speaking The Moralists adopt a superior position in all arguments based on their creed that all living things are sacred and therefore should not be killed. There is really little that I can say to this group as there is no common ground in our belief systems.

Of course, many anti-collectors fall into varying degrees of both groups much like most generalities in society.

To The Advanced Ones

I offer an argument: Take a look at this picture from Google Earth.

Click here to see in Google Earth.

This is part of the area where I collect 4 or 5 times a season. See the giant white blobs in the middle of the picture? That is a rock quarry and it is growing. Each year I loose another 10 or 20 acres of my collecting grounds to this cancer. As this quarry grows (to supply you and I with building material, roads, sidewalks, etc.) it eliminates complete habitats. Swamps and wetlands, mixed deciduous forest and open grass fields – all gone. The only record left of the insects found at this location is in my collection. A hundred years from now, when this location is ‘rehabilitated’ into a golf course, people will be able to look back at my journal and collection and see what this land looked like before it was raped and morphed into something else. They will be able to see and handle the exact insects that were found there. That is the value that I provide over and above what The Advanced can provide – physical data, not just digital data. Who knows what discoveries will be made between now and then – who knows how insects will be categorised or evaluated, all I know is that I’ve done my part in providing a physical periodic snapshot of that habitat at that particular time.

Collectors Cause Extinctions

Collectors are NOT eliminating insects – habitat loss is. Habitat loss is a result of all of us – you can’t pin that on someone else. When you live in a house that consumes electricity, drive in a vehicle that consumes fuel or walk on a sidewalk that is made of cement you’ve contributed to habitat loss. Look at the growth around you. It’s not the rock quarries that are the leading cause of habitat loss. It’s the suburbs, the roadways, the leisure lands – we are all the cause of habitat change and loss. The number of insects that I collect is infinitesimally small compared to the number of insects killed by changes in or elimination of habitat.

Don’t take any of this to mean that I am in any way opposed to watchers. They too, serve a valuable purpose in the study of insects and especially in the enlargement of our knowledge of insect territories. I may very well turn into a watcher if this experiment in remote/virtual collecting fails.

Please feel free to comment on this page if you feel you have something to add to this. However, I will moderate any comments that step over the line of decency and proper discussion/argument.