[leps-talk] value

[Michael Gochfeld]

Chris: 
I don't know the answer.  Do you?

The British Guiana 1 cent stamp used to be valued at $50,000.(that was
back when I was collecting stamps 50 years ago).  It's probably worth
more now.

The pair of Jamaican Homerus Swallowtails was offered at $5,000 (that
was back when I was looking at butterfly raising, about 10 years ago). 

I doubt that that is the rarest swallowtail.  So I'm not sure there is
"no comparison".
But I agree that the argument may be ridiculous even if the comparison
is not. 

If, on the other hand, you mean that there isn't a serious commercial
market for butterflies, then I invoke the traditional academic mantra
"more research is needed"/

I was in Malaysia some years ago when there was discussion of how one of
the country's finest collections (which should logically have gone to an
appropriate museum) was being broken up by his "estate" for sale to
individual bidders.  It must have been worth someone's time to do this. 

Mike Gochfeld

Mike Gochfeld


"Chris J. Durden" wrote:
> 
> Hey, just check the Scott, Stanley Gibbons and Michel catalogues to see how
> many *Agrias* you could buy for the cost of each of the 500 most valuable
> stamps.
>     This argument is rather ridiculous.
> What is the value of the rarest butterfly?
> What is the value of the rarest stamp?
> No comparison, eh!
> .................Chris Durden
> 
> ________________________________________________________________________
> Message: 4
> Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 07:52:07 -0700
> From: Paul Cherubini <monarch at saber.net>
> Subject: Re: Commercial value of butterflies
> Michael Gochfeld wrote:
>  > It's not an underground at all. There is a whole list serve
>  > devoted to the sale and purchase of specimens (both live and dead).
>  > It's the commercial aspect of butterfly specimens that worries
>  > conservationists (birders and butterfliers don't buy and trade specimens).
>  > Not many species command hundreds of dollars,
> Mike, an article in Outside Magazine hints at an underground
> industry where big dollars are paid for perfect rare / endangered
> butterflies and moths:
> http://www.outsidemag.com/magazine/0196/9601is.html
> "Although their case is the most prominent, Kral, Skalski, and
> Grinnell are not the only collectors to have run afoul of the Fish &
> Wildlife Service. Last July a commercial dealer named Charles
> Kondor was sentenced to five months in prison in Wisconsin.
> The indictment that same month of a collector in Texas, John
> William Kemner, who specialized in Mexican butterflies, is
> rumored to implicate some of the most important museums in
> the country, from the Smithsonian on down. Butterfly poaching
> and smuggling cases have been investigated independently in
> Britain, India, and China, where a pair of alpine silks was
> reportedly sold on the Japanese market for $37,000."
> I just wanted to know whether or not the motivation for
> the collecting and breeding of rare species in the Skalski-Kral-Grinnel
> case was to make money via underground trading or
> the motivation was simply to accumulate the worlds finest
> collection of rare butterflies (with the recently passed Fish &
> Wildlife endangered species laws getting in the way from time to time)
> Paul Cherubini
> 
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