Extinction by collecting an example.

Chris J. Durden drdn at mail.utexas.edu
Thu Jan 10 17:29:31 EST 2002


Thanks!
    An excellent account. Now where are all these hundreds (thousands?) of 
dealer's specimens. Did any of them find their way into carefully curated 
collections or were all of them lost to dermestids over the years? Are 
there still sales and auctions by dealers for this kind of material in Britain?
.............Chris Durden

At 12:30 PM 1/10/2002 +0000, you wrote:
>This is an example of an extinction by collecting. It is the British 
>day-flying
>moth the New Forest Burnet. Zygaena viciae ytenensis.
>
>Z. v. ytenensis was last recorded definitively in the New Forest in 1927 by
>W. Fassnidge at Wood Fidley, though there is an unconfirmed report from
>1947.   A photograph of the Wood Fidley location taken in
>1966 nearly 40 years after the last record of the moth shows it still to be
>an open, flowery area. The kind of habitat the moth needs.
>
>In 1899 the great British collector J. W. Tutt noted that the species was
>collected so systematically by professional dealers and collectors that in
>some years it was very rare indeed.  The species was reported as "gradually
>going" in 1903.  In 1907 a collector called R.E. James stated that the
>species could scarcely hold its own were not its headquarters on private
>ground.  Collectors took stragglers outside this area and James mentions one
>"professional" (probably a dealer) who lived there for a week and took 600
>specimens.
>
>In 1926  the collector T.H.L. Grosvenor in his address to the South London
>Entomological and Natural History Society referred to the precarious state of
>the species stating that because it was sluggish and easily seen a single
>collector intent  on taking large numbers could easily exterminate it.
>At the same period the collector A.E. Burras made a morning visit to one of
>the moth's locations and found over a dozen collectors already there.  They
>had divided the area between them and were methodically working each plot by
>walking up and down waiting for the moths to emerge.  Burras was so disgusted
>he returned home empty handed.
>
>In 1932 the collector  B. H. Cooke searched for the species in what were its
>known haunts but found no examples.  He understood it had been practically
>exterminated by over-collecting on the part of certain dealers a few years
>previously, these dealers having apparently "... sat around day after day
>watching for the insects to hatch out and walk into their nets".
>
>The collector S. G. Castle Russell, writing in 1942 said that there seemed to
>  be little doubt that the moth had been exterminated by over-collecting 
> in the New
>Forest and referred to a dealer who sat on the ground each day during the
>emergence and took every specimen that came out. Later, in 1951, he wrote that
>through its persecution by collectors and dealers for years, it inevitably
>became extinct.
>
>R. F. Bretherton, another eminent collector commented in 1951
>"if it is now completely gone, this seems to be a clear case of the
>destruction of an ancient species by the hand of man".  Yet another
>internationally eminent entomologist and collector E.B. Ford blamed
>it on the "inexcusable avarice of collectors".
>
>
>
>--
>Neil Jones- Neil at nwjones.demon.co.uk http://www.nwjones.demon.co.uk/
>"At some point I had to stand up and be counted. Who speaks for the
>butterflies?" Andrew Lees - The quotation on his memorial at Crymlyn Bog
>National Nature Reserve
>
>
>
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