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What group is more diverse?
Plankton or Bugs?
Are plankton just... sea bugs?
@futurebird
some plankton are tiny arthropods. But there are many other kinds of plankton not closely related to arthropods (or to each other), diatoms, radiolarians, algae, cyanobacteria, so many more I don't know anything about.
I don't know if anyone has done any equivalent to the "deathfog a dozen different species of trees, see how many new insects fall out, use that to estimate total insect diversity" experiments for plankton.
@llewelly @futurebird Why do we still have to kill creatures just to know that they exist?
I was saddened by the insect deaths that are used to catalog species, however if you are proposing trying to just photograph them all ... well. We'd probably only know about half of the insects we do now.
I assume most people who study insects like them and wouldn't kill a few 100 without it making good progress. And these death traps are nothing in comparison to the territory and environmental destruction that kills in the tens of millions.
@futurebird @kechpaja @llewelly This was true in the past but seems silly today. Capture, high res photogrammetry, release should be trivial.
There are bugs you'll never find if you just keep exposing different zone of the leaf litter and trees to light.
These arthropods are *only* found when you do a destructive survey. IDK how to get around that.
That said, I do not have the expertise to say if destructive surveys are done too often, but I do think doing them on occasion can't be avoided.
@futurebird @kechpaja @llewelly Seems like you could do a sort of destructive capture short of blasting the zone with pesticides or whatever they do.
@futurebird @dalias @kechpaja @llewelly
It's an interesting example. The first thing that comes to my mind as a Buddhist (I have taken a vow not to harm sentient beings) is whether it is necessary. I will kill a tick that has already burrowed into my skin. But I don't kill a mosquito that wants to bite me. Because it's not necessary. Is it necessary to document all these insects as quickly as possible, even at the cost of killing them?