Unintended Consequences? Lethal Specimen Collection Accelerates with Conservation Concern

Informing policy and practice on insect pollinator declines: Tensions between conservation and animal welfare

“…These insects are rarely used to generate data and are often discarded, offering no clear conservation benefit and constituting a negative welfare impact. Additionally, conservationists are increasingly concerned about the impact of lethal monitoring on target species (Tepedino and Portman, 2021;Montero-Castaño et al, 2022), particularly those that are vulnerable or threatened: a case study of North American bumble bees showed an increase in the number of lethal collections since the 1990s, even though data demonstrating taxonomic resilience of many recently imperiled bumble bee species are sparse (Miller et al, 2022).…”

“…Developing/validating new, non-invasive methods (like eDNA; Thomsen and Sigsgaard, 2019) or using a community-(e.g., "citizen")-science-driven photographic BioBlitz (Bickerman-Martens et al, 2017;or iNaturalist-style databases, Gazdic and Groom, 2019) could also support conservation-relevant data collection. Barlow andO'Neill (2020) andMiller et al (2022) review other non-lethal techniques not yet widely employed for pollinator monitoring, including: telemetry/radar, automated visual monitoring, machinelearning identification, molecular analyses, acoustic monitoring, and fecal sampling. Finally, some scientists have suggested that large-scale, community-level monitoring may be overemphasized for obtaining conservation-relevant data on pollinator ecology (Tepedino and Portman, 2021).…”

A non-destructive method to detect pathogens in bumble bees for conservation research

“…Additionally, the low-cost and widespread availability of the equipment should promote its use in eld studies and improve willingness to sample bees using non-destructive methods. As there are calls to reduce destructive sampling methods in bee research where possible (Miller et al, 2022;Montero-Castaño et al, 2022;Tronstad et al, 2022), using the updated cooler protocol will contribute to achieving this goal.…”

“…These approaches, however, require killing a signi cant number of individual bees (N = 20 to 300/population or species) to accurately measure wing or body size/mass, to extract the gut or to grind bodies, before conducting microscopic or molecular analyses (e.g., RT-PCR or qPCR) (Babin et al, 2022;Blaker et al, 2014;Garlin et al, 2022;Giacomini et al, 2018;Graystock et al, 2020;McNeil et al, 2020;Tsvetkov et al, 2021). Considering the increasing number of studies assessing bee health, with around 400 conservation-based studies per year on bumble bees alone (Cameron & Sadd, 2020), collecting as many as several thousand individuals per study, this approach is not sustainable and raises conservation concerns (Miller et al, 2022;Montero-Castaño et al, 2022). The conservation impact of repeated and widespread lethal sampling is rarely studied and merits further investigation (Montero-Castaño et al, 2022).…”

“…The few studies on the topic report contrasting effects of repeated lethal sampling (Gezon et al, 2015;Gibbs et al, 2017). Although the impact of scienti c research may be small compared to human-mediated impacts such as habitat loss, pesticides, pathogen spillover or climate change (Miller et Furthermore, sampling still remains an additional pressure on pollinators, which could be especially damaging to rare or endangered wild bee species and communities (Miller et al, 2022). In bumble bees, depending on infection intensity, the parasites reduce gyne production, queen tness and colony growth (Brown et al, 2000;Goulson et al, 2018), impair learning and foraging ability of workers (Gegear et al, 2005;Goulson et al, 2018), increase mortality of both males and workers (Grupe & Quandt, 2020;Otti & Schmid-Hempel, 2007) and ultimately lead to colony decline under eld-realistic stressful conditions (Brown et al, 2000).…”