Thread:Collecting and Diversity Studies (1)

Great to see a new website providing down-to-earth factual detail about real zoology. Natural History collections have become unfashionable and are seen by many as a throwback to Victorian zoology, with the assumption that they collected everything that needed collecting, especially in terms of large mammals from well-studied regions, and there is now no longer any need for such efforts.

In fact, with the growing official and academic interest in, and concern about biodiversity, collecting needs to be intensified to keep up with constant change in populations and lack of detailed knowledge of regional varieties. Since I began collecting in the 1980s new species of large mammals (wild boar, beaver) have been introduced into the UK, species have been driven close to extinction (red squirrel, water vole) come back from near extinction (otter, pine marten) and the local race of red deer is hybridising with introduced sikas.

There are different kinds of collecting, however; buying a hideously bleached example on eBay and ticking off one more species on your list will not contribute to biodiversity studies. The serious amateur collector must, like the academic, collect as much data as possible about each specimen, publish it and make the specimen available for study. This has, of course, never been easier thanks to the internet and the original avenues of local natural history society publications (etc) are still available.