The ethical implications of lethal insect collection

Dr. Zach Portman revisits the topic of ethical insect collection in his piece for Medium.

(Thanks to Bruce Taubert for the Centris bee photo used for this article)

Monitoring pollinator populations can be essential to conserving them - but should we be killing insects to try and save them?

Dr. Zach Portman does a phenomenal job highlighting the recent conversation in the pollinator monitoring community on the ethical issues surrounding the lethal sampling of bees. Bees may be sampled lethally for identification reasons - many can be hard to identify ‘on the wing’ or ‘in the net’. Lethal sampling methods can reduce time/labor spent on active sampling by using passive sampling instead. And, if specimens are deposited in collections with appropriate metadata, lethal sampling methods provide other records, data, and material to the scientific community long-term.

However, lethal sampling of insects also poses many ethical challenges in a landscape of unknowns - for instance, we know little about how lethal sampling may actually harm the very populations of bees we are studying and possibly accelerate declines. This is especially concerning given that Portman notes a rise in ‘extra lethal’ studies that use continuous sampling with blue vane traps (these traps are strongly expected to over-collect many insects). We also know little about insect experiences and welfare - lethal sampling methods could cause these animals to suffer and, minimally, takes a life. Portman summarizes these issues and more from recent publications on the topic, writing:

Overall, there are a few common themes across these papers: the number of lethal studies on bees is growing, the total number of bees killed for research is increasing rapidly, and scientists could be doing a much better job adopting best-practices to minimize lethal capture and to make already-collected specimens available for further study.

Portman cites Barrett’s 2023 publication with Drs. Stephen Buchmann and Bob Fischer on tensions between conservation and welfare aims in pollinator protection research as part of his review of the field.