How do you kill insects for collection?

It’s probably a combination of the sticky hairspray restricting movement, toxicity of the alcohols and hydrocarbon polymers in the spray, and blocking of their spiracles leading to asphyxiation.

 

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damn, when I want something dead, its dead.
Thanks Herc!

 

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That could very well be, I don't know actually..

 

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I wonder if any insect has actually been driven extinct by overcollecting. There's things like commercial exploitation, say of Morpho butterflies for the iridescent wings, but humans catching insects one at a time for collections seems a really unlikely method of wiping out an entire species,

and it's still less likely that we would know about it, if it had happened.

It's not that easy to tell if an insect has gone extinct, let alone why, even under ideal circumstances of large size and limited range such as the Lord Howe's Island Stick Insect mentioned in Enmos's link, which was rediscovered: http://www.springerlink.com/content/j46kx030uhuuq783/

Not that they don't go extinct: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118701202/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0 But wiping an insect out by personal collecting would be something like wiping the elephants out by personal trophy hunting.

In a world in which elephants could be raised by the dozen in a shed.

 

Get a jar with a screw on top. Fill the bottom with a little plaster. "Charge" it with ehtyl acetate. A tablespoon will last you about 48 hours. Fewer if you are putting a lot of bugs in there. Stuff a paper towel in there. This prevents bigger insects from crushing your delicate specimens, prevents things from hopping out when you open the jar (they tend to burrow down in the paper), and keep butterflies from busting their wings.




Enmos- you don't find it a little hypocritical that you protest killing bugs, but eat meat?

 

Yes, it is.
But I probably eat only a fraction of what you eat. And I don't eat meat for fun either, I kind of have to because I'm too lazy to figure out how to balance my diet without meat. I'm not a meat-eater if you know what I mean.

Besides, in this thread, I'm protesting against the way 'they' catch bugs. Why not use a camera ?

 

Aren't there some extremely rare species of butterflies and other tropical insects that may live on only a single tree in the middle of the rainforest? In rare cases like that, I can see collection of specimens playing a significant role in the species' demise.

 

A species might be decreased in number because one or more of the following things: deforestation, changes to aquatic environments, atmospheric pollution, loss of hosts, the introduction of exotic plants and animals, or the use of pesticides.
When a species gets rare it gains popularity among collectors, obviously because it's rare.
Rare species often already are vulnerable due to their low numbers. When collectors then increasingly try to get a hold of a specimen it goes without saying that that could cause extinction of the species.
You don't have to catch all individuals of a species to make it go extinct.

 

He was right, beheading is the most humane way. The drop in blood pressure is instantaneous and the animal is unconscious almost instantly then a couple of seconds and its dead.

Thats how we killed my rats. :bawl:

 

He could have at least sedated the bird before killing it.
What I forgot to mention is that he threw the bird, body and head, in the trash immediately after his talk.

 

Sedating is actually confusing for the animal, it thrashes about and gets anxious.

A clean beheading works best. Especially when you're studying the brain, you don't want to use chemicals that can affect your results.

 

Look, all he did was behead it, peal off the skull, show us the brain, and toss it in the garbage. What studying ?
He could just as well have showed us some pictures, or a pre-made video of beheading a bird.

 

Bet you remember that brain better than any picture.

 

I knew what a brain looked like before that.
Anyway, we're off-topic.

 

for fun? And how do you have to? They sell veggie burgers at the store. In fact they sell entire lines of meatless food. :shrug: If you eat meat, you are a meat eater, right? :shrug:

 

If there are only a few living on only 1 tree, I think nature has already had a hand in their demise.

 

Perhaps, but the trees in the tropical rainforest aren't really the same as what we have in temperate zones. A single tree hundreds of different species that may never have to leave that tree to find what they need. Each one, in some circumstances (as in, not all species of tree in the tropics are equal), a tree can be an ecosystem in itself. But you're right, a species that has such small numbers to begin with is already in a pretty fragile situation.

I was merely saying that fragile species such as these could be included in the "extinct due to over-collection" category mentioned in Enmos' link. But, I don't know for sure if species like this even exist, or if they were exaggerations by presenters in a Discovery Channel special on the rainforest to sensationalize the problematic deforestation that occurs there.

 

To be classified as having been driven to extinction by collection, we need the bug:

1) to have been located and completely described, including range and entire habitat

2) to have been collected at a rate significant to the entire population, for some reason (commercial exploitation is not "collection").

3) to have been verified as not present in any part of their former range, as completely described.

4) to have been spared the standard extinction pressures, significantly.

That state of affairs seems very unlikely, to me.

 

Yes, but by meat-eater (in this case) I meant someone that particularly likes meat. I'm not.
But obviously I am a meat-eater in the sense that I eat meat.

 

Forget the one-tree-species. But there are species that are highly specialized to one particular habitat though, and sometimes such a habitat only exists in one place.