Keeping papered specimens

[Chuck]

From Treehopr in a different topic that got off track, but worthy of discussion:

I personally think the most proactive thing that any collector can do is ONLY collect what you can prepare in a timely manner. And by this, I mean what you CAN PREPARE within two or three days time (after capture).

I heartily disagree.

To start, excerpts from Lep Soc Statement on Collecting: https://www.lepsoc.org/content/statement-collecting

Collections or specimens, and their associated written or photographic records, should be willed or offered to the care of an appropriate scientific institution if the collector lacks space or loses interest, or in anticipation of death.

Collecting adults or immature stages should be limited to sampling, not depleting, the population concerned.

Note there is nothing in the statement concerning capture of specimens in excess of what one can process over any time span, or any mention of papered specimens.

Why accumulation of papered specimens is beneficial:

1. Time. Whether collecting thousands of specimens in the tropics, or collecting more than can be processed during a northern summer, it may be impossible to process all specimens while fresh.

2. Sharing: Excess papered specimens are readily shared with other researchers.

3. No Waste: particularly with light traps, bycatch is inevitable. One can either toss them, or preserve them for others and/or future research.

4. Future research: Who knows where ones interests will go? I'm kicking myself now because my collection and the two for which I have ready access with regional Tiger swallowtails were low in quantity. Why bother we all thought? Note at the time that MST and Papilio canadensis didn't exist. If we had captured and papered more 40 years ago, I'd have gladly set 500 specimens now for morphological studies.

5. Changing taxonomy and environmental changes: best noted anecdotally when it turned out what I thought was one species of Sphingid from Ecuador turned out to be four- many times over. New species are being named from papered material stored in institutions for decades. Ecological ruin in certain areas of the globe have extirpated taxa, some of it known only from re-discovered papered material.

Papered specimens are data, just as are old ship's logs from the Spanish Conquest of South America. In many cases, both languished unknown, uncared for, and of no interest until SOMEBODY became interested, at which time the data turns into information. Both have been invaluable in our understanding of the subject matter.

There is nothing that forces one to retain papered specimens. The fact that institutions and private collections as a whole contain probably a million papered specimens is indicative of a failure to properly fund processing of the specimens; IMHO this is indicative of a great problem, a "dumbing down" as interests change from the natural sciences to monetized research (scientific community) and time wasting activities like baseball and social media (general public.) The answer isn't to stop collecting data, it's to change society such that we recognize that data is important.