Collecting plant and animal specimens is essential for scientific studies and conservation and does not, as some critics of the practice have suggested, play a significant role in species extinctions.
Those are the conclusions of more than 100 biologists and biodiversity researchers who signed a letter to the journal Science published online May 22. The letter is a response to an April 18 Perspectives article in Science arguing that alternative methods of documentation—such as high-resolution photography, audio recordings and nonlethal tissue sampling for DNA analysis—make the field collection of animal and plant specimens unnecessary.
That's just not the case, according to the authors of the response letter, many of whom work in natural history museums that house the preserved remains of animals and plants. The authors are from more than 60 research institutions on six continents and include six scientists from the University of Michigan's Museum of Zoology.
"None of the suggested alternatives to collecting specimens can be used to reliably identify or describe animals and plants," said Cody Thompson, mammal collections manager and assistant research scientist at the U-M Museum of Zoology.
"Moreover, identification often is not the most important reason to collect specimens. Studies that look at the evolution of animal and plant forms through time are impossible without whole specimens. Preserved specimens also provide verifiable data points for monitoring long-term changes in species health and distribution." In addition, specimens from museum collections and their associated data are essential for making informed decisions about species management and conservation now and in the future, the authors state.
"Photographs and audio recordings can't tell you anything about such things as a species' diet, how and where it breeds, how quickly it grows, or its lifespan—information that's critical to assessing extinction risk," said Luiz Rocha of the California Academy of Sciences, who organized the response to the Science article. And contrary to statements made in the April 18 Science article titled "Avoiding (Re)extinction," collecting biological specimens does not play a significant role in species extinctions, according to the rebuttal authors.
In the April article, Arizona State University's Ben Minteer and three co-authors cite several examples of species extinctions and suggest that the events were linked to overzealous museum collectors.
Not so, according to authors of the rebuttal letter, who reviewed the evidence and found that none of the cited extinctions—including the disappearance of flightless great auks in Iceland and Mexican elf owls on Socorro Island, Mexico—can be attributed to scientific collecting.
Millions of great auks were harvested for food, oil and feathers over the millennia, and only about 102 exist in scientific collections. Mexican elf owls were common when specimens were collected between 1896 and 1932, and the most likely reasons for extinction around 1970 were habitat degradation and predation by invasive species.
At the same time, Minteer and his colleagues failed to point out any of the valuable services that museum biological collections have provided over the decades, according to the rebuttal authors.
From the press release of University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, VS
