Researchers responded in dispute to a past paper that highlighted the harmful effects of taking live specimens from the wild for scientific purposed.
The researchers claim that the impact of live samples on the overall population is minimal, and could improve conservation efforts, a California Academy of Sciences news release reported.
"A few representatives taken for scientific collections is a drop in the bucket compared to the many other threats that species face today," Luiz Rocha, Ph.D., the Academy's Assistant Curator and Follett Chair of Ichthyology said in the news release. "Habitat degradation and loss, unsustainable harvesting, and invasive species each play much larger and more devastating roles in population decline and species extinction."
In the paper "Avoiding (Re)extinction" researchers argued that past species collection has played a role in their extinction. They recommended alternative methods for research, such as "photography, audio recordings, and non-lethal tissue collection," the news release reported.
Rocha and colleagues argue that while these methods are useful in some instances, they cannot provide the same wealth of information in many cases.
"Photographs and audio recordings can't tell you anything about such things as a species' diet, how and where it breeds, how quickly it grows, or its lifespan - information that's critical to assessing extinction risk, and vital IUCN Red List designation," Rocha said. "And because photos and sound recordings provide only snapshots of individuals at one time and place, they can't be used to understand how a species and its ecology, distribution, and population dynamics have changed over time, or how individuals vary from one part of the species' range to another."
In the past researchers have successfully used the body size of live specimens to look at the effects of climate change on species and have tracked the spread of diseases and funguses.
"There are a lot of diseases in many different species that we can better understand by tracking them through time, addressing questions about where the disease came from, what the pattern has been, and whether anything has fundamentally shifted in the environment," David Blackburn, Ph.D., Assistant Curator of Herpetology at the California Academy of Sciences, said in the news release. "But a snapshot from one time period won't allow us to answer those questions; we only get that ability from looking at many historical records over time."
