Collecting specimens in the name of science

Unfortunately, in order for a species to be described, a voucher specimen usually has to be taken and lodged in a museum or other collection. The species original description will involve comparisons with other related species, highlighting the differences.

Until a species is officially described it can't be afforded protection, simply because until then it might just be a weird individual of a known and common species.

Furthermore, many of the new species discovered every year are actually subspecies or discrete populations that are elevated to species status, and many of these elevations are based upon research that involves examining individual specimens that are already held in collections.

I'm curious to know what David Brown thinks?

:p

Hix
 
Collecting specimens.....

I thought things had changed in the wake of the Bulo Burti Bush-shrike?
 
Sometimes it is not done, for example the new owl species that was found in Oman, was not collected, but described on the basis of good photographs and sound recordings. I also doubt that the new Cheirolageus species that was discovered this year was collected.... You do not always need to kill the animal to describe it, allthough this is only possible with vertebrates (and then only the larger ones), but that are also the ones that occur in the lowest densities normally.
 
@ FFBird : the Bulo Burti Bush-shrike was collected but not death but alive ( see my picture
http://www.zoochat.com/2065/bulo-burti-bush-shrike-342631/ ) and later released back into to wild. Feathers and blood-samples were used as type-material but later it was found this 'new' species was just a 'mutation'.
The idea however is IMO very good and rare, new discovered species should be collected alive, photographed, blood-samples collected, other DNA ( feathers, skin or something like that ) collected and then the animal should be released again. Later, when a natural died animal has been found, this also can be used as type-material.
 
Not as relevant to this thread as I would like it to be, but I remember reading something about Northern Elephant Seals being found after they were thought to be extinct. There were eight and the Smithsonian shot seven of them for their collection.
 
wensleydale said:
Not as relevant to this thread as I would like it to be, but I remember reading something about Northern Elephant Seals being found after they were thought to be extinct. There were eight and the Smithsonian shot seven of them for their collection.
Click to expand...

That was in 1884, hopefully we have learned something since. Actually in that era there was quite a bit of competition amongst museums, and also wealthy collectors, to build up their collections, and the rarer the animal the better. I don't know if it caused any actual extinctions, but it can't have helped.
 
I believe the last colony of great auks win Iceland were killed largely to be used as museum specimens as well.
 
That's an entirely different thing. Great Auks were hunted to extinction for profit, people liked buying eggs and stuffed birds for their collections. The reason might seem more scientific than hunting an animal for meat or bogus medicines, but it had nothing to do with real science.

The Great Auk was already well known and described by the time they were wiped out, and it was private collectors, not scientific institutions that pushed them over the edge.
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Obviously in some cases an animal is so rare that collecting specimens is a bad idea, but generally it's a good thing that we can compare modern animals to those for a hundred years ago or more.

If we didn't have collections of 19th century raptor eggs then we wouldn't have known about the disastrous effects of DDT, and we may have acted too late to save some species
 
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