How important are/were amateur collectors?

[timmsyrj]

A quick search for "how many people eat insects" turns up a page from IFLScience, that has figures that over 2 billion people eat insects each year and have done for thousands of years, yet it's the few thousand entomologists who are to blame, and you'll find it's only the pretty colourful ones they want to save, butterflies.
An insect is an insect, why are they happy to differentiate and lay blame at the feet of entomologists for collecting colourful ones but they don't campaign against eating them or using pesticides in gardens etc, just shows the mind set of these morons.

Rich

[Deleted]

I think it all depends on why we collect, to me the moral side only comes into play when people over collect a very rare/local species and mass slaughter it whatever condition the specimen is in for no other reason than to make money, a private collector going about his studies causes no damage to insect populations whatsoever as anybody who knows anything about insect population dynamics will tell you. There are those here in the UK who shout long and loud about how a blanket collecting ban should be applied to include all British species while totally ignoring habitat destruction, whatever their reasoning it is never based on any kind of knowledge of the subject at all. As someone who has suffered greatly at their hands this year I feel I am well qualified to comment on the subject, amateur collectors have contributed a massive amount of both specimens and data to our national collections and instead of rounding on them we owe them a massive debt of gratitude for their efforts as I would imagine a very high percentage of the insects in museums come from responsible amateurs who value data as much as the actual specimen.

[leon]

I wonder how many of these critics of collectors eat the meat that's "murdered" for their consumption. And how many live in nice suburban areas that have been built over the habitat of rare insects ?
Personally, I'm an animal lover; I eat them daily.

[wollastoni]

Those anti-entomologists are at war against science.
Some of them would burn the British Museum if they could.