The world’s largest bee and the cautionary tale of its rediscovery

Collective action on a small scale (like the Florida Panther) or on a larger scale like the worldwide ban on the ivory trade has been effective. We have to pick our battles. 'Deserves' may not be the best word, but it signifies that we can decide if we want to.

If you're saying that the bee had it coming - we all got it coming, kid.

Since this article has the potential to amplify the problem, it’s too bad they didn’t have a link at the end to donate to a “save the bees” charity.

Perhaps, for instance, lands in those regions could be bought and protected.

The problem is people with zero experience involving raising endangered life will pay loads of money just to say they have something rare in their possession, and people will gladly harvest those things just for money.

Endangered plants are an obvious example. They often take decades or centuries to regrow, and locals will happily dig them up to sell for a few bucks now in exchange for destroying their future.

Governments usually grant special permission to zoos and people with expertise to research how to properly breed animals, and that seems to generally work out better than just throwing them at anyone with some cash who just saw a cute animal on youtube.

Great idea, until it's your enterprising neighbour trying to breed black rhinos in their back yard.

Because the animals will die in transit, or die off under the 'care' of their new owners, either through incompetence or purely because nobody understands how to keep them alive in any form of captivity in the first place.

And the people in the local area will facilitate their local extinction in their natural habitat, because of money. Which (given the first point) is likely to accelerate their total extinction.

And if any of those species do survive after such commercial relocation, they may well escape and become invasive feral species in their new home.

Basically, commercial incentives to fuck with nature are a bad idea. What we could really do with are commercial incentives to leave it the hell alone.

Firstly, a lot of endangered species are a bit particular about how and when they breed. Secondly, breeding an endangered species with a limited gene pool requires very careful management to minimise inbreeding depression.

How would you co-ordinate multiple private breeders, who have their own incentives, to save a species?

Thirdly, look at tropical fish and, well, dogs. People breeding them tend to favour particular traits that lead to deformed fish that would never survive in the wild, or dogs that can't give birth naturally anymore. How do you ensure that the private breeders are breeding for genetic robustness, not a particular trait that's appealing to buyers?

Lastly, and most importantly - what happens when you legalise ownership of endangered species, and captive breeding can't keep up with demand? If you guessed "poaching", you guessed right.

Then there's also the fact that even if captive breeding could meet all market demand, the fact that now everyone in the lizard collecting community can have a jewelled gecko can drive certain collectors to want to own a "real" one, a wild one, to stand out from the people who have captive bred ones.

This drive from aficionados to have the "authentic" product can be seen, for an example I can speak on, in venison exports from New Zealand to Germany.

Germany loves venison, it's hard to come by in Europe, we can farm efficiently in NZ, and so we farm deer, butcher them, and export the meat to Germany. (NB: when I'm talking venison here, I'm referring to the meat of the red deer, Cervus elaphus. NZ has many other introduced species of deer, but reds are the most widespread and numerous, and also the one we have learned to farm the best, thanks to the market in Asia for deer velvet[0]).

But a lot of German consumers want "real" venison, which means wild venison.

So we market farmed venison as "cervena" to differentiate it from wild vension, and then use helicopters to harvest thousands of tonnes of wild venison from public land (called Wild Animal Recovery Operations, or WARO for short, actually a really great way of keeping deer numbers below ecosystem degrading numbers).

The price premium it attracts makes the helicopter flight hours needed to harvest wild venison actually economical. [1], [2], and a perspective common of recreational hunters who despise WARO operations because no-one wants to walk into the mountains for two days, and then watch a helicopter shoot everything moving in the valley. [3]

But the thing is, wild venison is always worse eating than farmed venison. It's far leaner (and venison is lean enough already, a larding needle is essential for cooking venison roasts[4]), tougher, it's gamier, it's just a poorer eating experience.

Yet because German consumers consider it more "authentic", it attracts a premium.

This is most likely what would happen to endangered species where you could buy a captive bred one, or a wild one.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velvet_antler

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptfr-LyXo8s

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKWvsS-z9PU

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmvZ3y3RMXs

[4]: https://www.meilleurduchef.com/en/recipe/to-lard-a-piece-of-...

You mean like an animal NFT?

In the talk page:

"Right now, the article says,

Its species name was made a dedication to the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. The genus name means blind. The dedication did not go unnoticed by the Führer, who sent Sheibel a letter, showing his gratitude. "Blind Hitler" doesn't sound like a dedication, more like an insult. Was anybody unaware of this at that time or simply didn't care? --Revth 05:03, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

The part of the name meaning 'blind' is the genus name, it was already there when Schiebel discovered the beetle and he couldn't really do much more than just group it into that category, even less so renaming an already existing, and descriptive name like Anophthalmus. -Obli (Talk)? 10:27, 15 June 2006 (UTC)"

At first part of me thought a name-change might be appropriate. But I'm okay with calling this beetle a "Blind Hitler" even if the prejorative wasn't the entomologist's intention.

The biome is not being managed by the free market. Slices of biodiversity are not being bought, sold or invested in. The biosphere is outside the system and untracked by its incentives.

>"the ruling class decided the biome will be managed by the free market... The free market has decided much of nature shouldn't exist, like reefs & forest etc."

I am not sure where you get the idea that the 'ruling class' delegated this decision, or that the free market decided anything at all. Historically, the 'ruling classes' don't tend to share power, and have made plenty of consequential environmental decisions with no market feedback (see Mao's Four Pests campaign). The free market on the other hand is just a mechanism for pricing and exchange, it doesn't decide anything; individual market actors make decisions, and spontaneous order results.

I'm even more confused about how you got from the biome to the stock market and NFTs; perhaps you could enlighten me? NFTs seem to be a bubble, but they're not as wasteful as proof of work tokens.

If you read closely (imo), it’s the desperate class(es) on both supply and purchasing side that drove the poaching cycle. Generally speaking, ruling class are secure enough in their status they don’t need the “short term sale over the long term benefits” or the “look I’m special/unique too because I bought a really big bee that you don’t have.”

You seem to be conveniently leaving out that we all enjoy having air conditioning and modern forms of transportation, to name a few positive things. But yes, society is here trading coral reefs for NFT art, right?

The first photo in this article shows the captive bee: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47311186