[Catalist] Female Praying Mantis and her Ootheca

[Leon Harris]

In answer to this point:
>
> I am pleased “Insectopia [URL: http://www.insectopia.com.au] is 
> retreating from trading live invertebrates!” Should science teachers 
> ask their science students to make collections of insects?
>
>
I am uncomfortable from the wholesale retreat from nature that recent 
generations of kids have experienced. In the end, I do not believe that 
an ignorant, isolated, non-valuing population will advance the cause of 
nature.


I think it has to be nuanced: in an urban environment, a couple of 
cockroaches, a bee, some moths and lawn beetles per kid will have no 
effect on populations. You obviously wouldn't loose them on Kings Park.

A population of insects, bred as pets, is probably a good thing. 
Silkworms, anyone?


We happily stand by while worlds are lost -urban sprawl (ie, some other 
humans "right" to have a house just like ours) that collapses insect, 
vertebrate and plant populations. I still remember a flock of a couple 
of hundred black cockies that used to fly over my childhood house. I 
remember catching (and letting go baardie grubs), bandicoots and honey 
possums where factories now stand, and every possible kind of lizard or 
snake imaginable. I still stop my car to shoo a Burtons legless lizard 
off the road (last time in November). Interacting with these things as a 
child makes me value them, although the caught-and-jar-ed ( and later 
released) critter probably didn't appreciate being valued at the time! 
All that is gone now.

If anything, I think we need more interaction with nature, and some of 
it may be low -level destructive. Or perhaps, you can achieve much the 
same by getting the kid to make a collection by emptying the oyster 
lights around the porch. That leads to an interesting moral dilemma - 
which is worse, the kid who pins a few insects from a few families, or 
the households (most of us) that kill low kilogram quantities (wet 
weight) of insects per year due to their light usage patterns?

In my opinion, we need to develop a system-level focus on nature, and 
move from the current maudlin sentimentality that latches onto poster 
animals - a koala, when an over-grazed eucalypt forest will destroy 4 
species of possum; a family of penguins, when overfishing will locally 
make extinct 100 other species. I like the pre 1788 Aboriginal approach 
- if the numbers are getting out of hand, eat it ! Has anyone got a good 
recipe for feral camel?


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