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It's a fairly common concern, however in the view of entomologists, the number of individual arthropods killed is generally a drop in the bucket. Moreover, many species cannot be identified without detailed examination. As one entomologist explains: > In addition, a lot of important insect parts need to be extracted for species-level identification. Often the methods required for this aren’t possible to perform on live insects, and when they are they often injure the insects anyways.
> https://askentomologists.com/2015/01/01/why-do-entomologists... Personally, I've tried to identify certain fly species using several high quality photographs taken from multiple angles, however at best one might get the genus; figuring out which species it is often requires direct access to the insect and may even require dissection in some cases. This was the case when trying to figure out exactly what species of horse fly was attacking me while out hiking. Even with a decent key, provided by the Canadian Journal of Arthropod Identification, I couldn't get a definitive answer on the specific species. (cf http://cjai.biologicalsurvey.ca/t_13/t_1321.htm ) And on iNaturalist.org, a citizen science project based on automated visual recognition (using user-supplied, geotagged photos) and often the participation of expert identifiers, many insect species have never been ID'd even once. And that's a combination of the issues of rarity (and perhaps species loss) and the challenge of visual identification. In one family in Order Diptera (flies) that I examined, less than 1/3 of the Genuses had any observations, and in one of the genuses that did have a decent number of observations, those were assigned to only 12% of the species in that genus. So there are strong limitations to what we can do without harming individual insects. Nonetheless, these sampling and identification methods don't substantially harm insect populations. |