Hello People and Creepy-Crawlies

Hi,

What seems weird and 'dead thing' to you, has beauty and scientific value for an insect collector and serious entomologist. Also, on this site, almost all members are insect collectors, so they like 'dead things' and it doesn't seem weird to them at all.

I'll second that Thanos! Notice that underneith the logo it says 'Network for Insect Collectors'. So hopefully you don't mind the "weird people" who collect "dead things".

I never noticed that =0o Blimey . A bit of an insect morgue then =0) Joke . Don't take it personally =0) Well I'll see how dead thing collectors are at identifying this bush cricket . Pic coming up in " identify this bug section " I could realy do with some help for just the genus . Let alone the species . Help appreciated x

And me.

You look like the kind of people that point with their finger at others and tell them their behaviour is weird and morally wrong, unaware of their OWN actions. Unless you are vegetarian, don't drive a car, never use a single piece of medicine and never use a computer (oh blimey, you just did) you do not have the moral high ground to do so. All these activities do frequently kill large amounts of animals and insects. Don't pull the argument now that these activities kill animals not on purpose but just as collateral damage and that the morally objectionable thing is to purposefully kill an animal. Nobody in here kills the animal for the sake of killing. In order to fully quantify a specimen you have, in many cases to look at internal organs, check their legs under microscope or the head region. Even with best macro crucial identification can remain unseen.

In order to give a straight forward example to this, I have seen literally dozens of pictures of people claiming to have taken a picture as much resolved that you can see the tibial sporn of a specimen of Plebejus arge / Plebejus idas, a crucial morphological character for determination of this species complex. In all of their picture you just saw a shadow which may have been at the correct spot, but not a well defined sclerotized sporn as you would need it.

The next step is that the entomologist gathers data about past distribution of species, how could we go about this ? We could just take a book and write down what we saw and store this. Please note that you may think that we could just electronically store this data nowadays, but no, you are wrong and badly informed again. A CD/DVD burned in a private household will loose it's data content pretty soon and storage disks frequently end up in accidents with water or magnets. Do you have any data file that is over ten years old? I don't. Let's get back to the book storage problem. Who does guarantee that the written data is correct ? What if a species complex like Plebejus argus/ Plebejus idas gets only recognized after several years, decades, centuries? Who tells us how experienced the identifier was? In order to avoid all of these problems we take voucher specimens and store them away. The oldest date back to the 17th century and remain in a fall-out-shelter in London.

It was good to explicitly state that you do not want to send dead specimens away if this does not please you. You come from a remote part of the world and I bet that collectors would have flooded your email in-box.

On the other hand it was totally wrong to point with fingers at us and call us strange and claim that we would have no love for insects. I have given you the reasons above, we do not kill because we want it , we have to go trough it in the process of doing proper work. Having said this I hope you will have a great time on here, do learn to understand our standpoint and will post a lot of pics in the future. I would particularly like to see some Lycaenidae from your part of the world.

Have a nice day,
Claude