please help us...HERE I COME!

Paul Cherubini monarch at saber.net
Thu Apr 11 13:01:28 EDT 2002


In regard to Bob Pyle's statement "All these people who 
breed butterflies, their mission statements are so full of
biological crap. It's a smokescreen for profit," Jere Kahanpaa
wrote:

> Well, I'm tempted to believe in this statement, but it is probably an
> over-generalization: some of the releasers might be 'good guys', even
> though I cannot see much scientific return of such a release program.
> Using pseudoscience as a cover motivation for profiting is in itself
> something that should be punishable by instant vaporization. 

Jere, the reason the monarch breeders came up with these IBBA 
tags http://www.saber.net/~monarch/tags5.JPG is because one 
anti-release monarch scientist, Dr. Karen Oberhauser
and her graduate students urged the breeders to start tagging.
Last year they wrote:

"At the present time, scientists that study monarchs and other
free-living species have no way of knowing whether insects
they capture are captive-reared or wild." 

"Protocols for either (a) reporting or (b) marking all released 
individuals would greatly assist us in evaluating the scale of
this enterprise and its impacts on wild populations."

So the breeders are not only tagging, they are using the tagging
requirement as a way of promoting good PR for the release industry.
Just last week one breeder wrote:

"This is a value added to your orders.  Tell your customers 
their butterflies are part of a special study for butterflies! 
This makes an added interest to your order.  It gives them 
something really interesting to talk about at their event.  We 
will be printing up a one-page description of what the tagging 
is all about, to put in people's orders.  I think most people will
be fascinated with the notion and will also learn a lot about 
butterflies and our trade."

So here we have a situation where the release industry has taken
a potentially burdensome requirement (tagging) imposed by 
certain anti-release scientists and turned it into a marketing 
opportunity for themselves.

It will be interesting to see whether or not the anti-release scientists
and conservationists who originally urged the breeders to start
tagging won't turn around and start complaining as Bob Pyle did 
that the tagging is being used "as a smokescreen for profit".

Paul Cherubini
Placerville, CA

 
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