InsectNet forum

The whole story began several years ago when Costa Rican customs inspected several parcels addressed to France, the Netherlands, Germany and Taiwan. The contents of the parcels were declared as handicrafts of low value. The confiscated parcels contained various insects.

One of the parcels contained a single beetle (Macrodontia .sp) with notes stating a value of approximately USD 1,000.
The authorities then assumed that insects from Costa Rica were fetching astronomical prices on the European and Asian markets.

The sender of most of the parcels was a well-known family of insect traders who also (legally) run a butterfly farm.
Several of the family's buildings were searched by the police, all the insects found were confiscated and 4 members of the family were arrested.
For a long time, there were extensive press reports about this incident.

To make matters worse, since then the population has been regularly asked to report observations of insect collectors to the authorities immediately.
Since then, the nature conservation authorities have been carrying out more checks and even minor offences are punished immediately.
Last December, an elderly German man who had collected a total of around 20 butterflies and moths had to learn this the hard way. (See link below)

However, it can be assumed that the penalties will not be anywhere near as draconian as in the case of the two Italians from Sri Lanka.

https://www.teletica.com/nacional/detie ... nia_374989

https://www.nacion.com/sucesos/judicial ... GNI/story/

https://ministeriopublico.poder-judicia ... -silvestre

Admittedly this is a tangent Chuck, but:

" When you go to one of the Lep-focused places in Colombia, French Guiana, etc they take care of all that for you, and make the trip worthwhile."

I was under the impression that Colombia is one of the more restrictive countries, with an expensive permitting process...


PT

Borearctia wrote: Wed Mar 26, 2025 3:28 pm Extra TV in Costa Rica ran a news report with the headline: ‘Japanese man kills thousands of butterflies’

This video only shows a few hundred specimens of unknown papered (assumed to be) insects. It is not proven that anything shown is actually connected to the person or subject or that it is actually related to this arrest. Where are the so-called thousands of butterflies. This story is obviously simply exaggerated BS and another example, like previous hundreds, illustrating uneducated and uninformed persons making political statements involving meaningless and costly laws to prevent others from doing meaningful scientific research. These actions are taken simply to convince the uninformed public across the world, their positions are needed to protect our environment. They are touting the existence of their actions are reasons to keep them employed. Foreign specialist and generalist collectors have discovered hundreds of millions of animals including insects over many past centuries in countries not their own. Where are the discoveries in our scientific literature by citizens of Costa Rica? Answer: very few and mostly less scientifically valuable in nature, less important and often non-current and documenting misidentified and questionable species.

Without foreign collecting there would be no Seitz volumes of images and related text from major continents of the world, nor Biol. of Central America volumes and hundreds of millions of other publications, including the discovery and published descriptions of hundreds of thousands of species of all world animal species, not just insects.

As for collecting, the naysayers do not realize there are hundreds of millions of museum and university animal specimens of every conceivable kind across the world. How did these specimens find their way into world museums? These originated from researchers involved in field research throughout the world. Naysayers often say why do we need all these specimens? Only uninformed and uneducated persons say these things. Until we denude the entire earth, new species will continue to be discovered in the future. My own 55 years of research exemplifies such matters, as shortly we will have placed 1.2 million top quality insect specimens in museums across the entire world, including discovering over 400 species of moths new to science. And we stopped counting new moth discoveries about 18 years ago.

Much of what the public reads in the news and especially on the WWW is phony. If you disagree you are not very observant.