Subdue, Stun, or Kill: How far will you go for a macro photo?

what about the ones found arond the house? Do you put them outside afterwards or back in the same spot in your house?

I sometimes try to make them mad by shaking the leaves they are on..so maybe they will get in defense stance and a neat shot. or I will try to get them to walk over somewhere else or turn around...I havnt killed any

Athena wrote:
what about the ones found arond the house? Do you put them outside afterwards or back in the same spot in your house?

I try to put them outside under cover. Much more chance of survival than in the house with my two "eat anything" cats!

Last point of discussion, if I may.

I guess it's a matter of "Do the least amount of harm with the technology at hand." If we can take a shot without causing any distress, we should choose that as our course of action.

Naturalist John James Audubon (1785-1851) had to kill his subjects in order to paint them. I guess photography is nature's best friend.

I didn't vote, because it's radio buttons. Shock, horror! I'd have to choose all, plus two that aren't there--tickle and bait.

But: not all for all types of photo. There seems to be a culture in photo groups that photo are only for art, or perhaps to make something look it's best (or better than it's best ) for advertising. Which leaves out scientific/illustrativ​e/documentation/educat​ional photography.

If a photo is for the sake of a nice photo, or learning how to take photos, tickling with a grass blade in hopes of turning something around is about the most I'd do. Because stunned/subdued/dead critters look stunned/subdued/dead, not natural at all. Moving them is also unnatural, and a subtle way of telling a fib. Many bugs are on particular plants/parts of plants for a reason, and those relationships can be the most interesting thing about them. If you change that relationship, it could mislead someone later if you don't make it clear what you did. It's a lot easier to not tell the fib in the first place.

But, I do kill and collect some bugs, and capture/release others, and I sometimes bait to see who likes what at which time of year, and some of that gets photographed as a way of record keeping. With few exceptions, it's simply not possible to identify invertebrates beyond Family without a corpse. And it's not possible to learn as much as I want to learn about them and their relationships without a good ID. To help get the ID, I'll take pictures of corpses so I can try to learn more about the important identifying structures--it's a way of focusing my brain as well as the camera. These pictures aren't intended to be art. They aren't usually attractive at all, but they are useful (and I hope they'll get more useful if I ever get better control of the darned equipment )

As for the ethics of killing and collecting: we, each and every one of us, are killing millions of creatures every day. By walking across a field, by driving a car, by eating agricultural products and seafoods, by building houses and roads, by wearing clothes, by cleaning our houses, by taking pharmaceuticals. Collecting a few invertebrates a week just isn't in that league. I'd rather not pretend to myself that I'm not contributing to all of those other deaths just because I don't see them. By paying attention to how my actions matter, I can reduce those millions of deaths in a more meaningful way. No car, less cotton use (the most heavily pesticided crop of all), organic or IPM foods when possible, minimal house cleaning with mild soaps only, replacing my urban invasive lawn grass desert with native plants to bring nature to me instead of moving 'out to the country to live near nature'.

Salticid - whilst humans indirectly kill other things (for food, shelter etc), I work on the premise of eat or use (in some way) what you kill. The North American Indians wasted nothing - everything got used. They killed to survive, not for joy or research. What you've said applies to millions of lab rats and mice that are brutally murdered every year in the name of 'research'. I can see what you're saying, and can understand it, but I don't have to agree with it! Animals/insects die eventually, simply find their dead bodies and study them (I know this is easier said than done)!

Dave

Dead insects are usually very quickly dis-assembled by ants, so that might be rather hard. If you're going to kill them for research, I say do it nicely... share a beer with them or something first...

I used to belive this, but it's a species-centric viewpoint. If you use every bit, there are no leftovers for others. Take a decidedly non-macro example: whale carcasses. The japanese attempt to justify their whale meat industry on the basis that the whales they kill for 'research' aren't 'wasted'. But that means that not only are they lowering some whale populations severely, but the whales they kill don't sink--all that meat, blubber and bone is removed from the ocean ecosystem. Because there are fewer whale carcasses on the sea bottom, many deep sea populations, including thermal vent critters, can no longer successfully move from one area to another, because they rely on whale carcasses as way stations. The loss of carcasses essentially fragments some parts of the ocean habitat on a grand scale, inducing inbreeding depression and leaving fewer escape hatches if they need to move in the event of disaster, such as their hydrothermal vent cooling off (each vent is active for decades to a hundred years or so, not for eons.)

In the pacific northwest, if the top predators didn't 'waste' most of the salmon they catch, the forests would die. Oversimplified: The salmon spend about four years at sea growing big. As they come back to the rivers and lakes to spawn, everybody wants to catch and eat them. The bears mostly eat the brain and other fatty bits, not the whole fish. The wolves prefer some other part, I forget which. The eagles eat whatever they can steal. The foxes and ravens take the rotting leftovers and drag them all over the place, which gives life to many fungi, insects and small mammals. The nitrogen from those rotting carcasses can be traced from sea to tree by isotope analysis, and it accounts for as much as 30 percent of the nutrients that lets a forest grow on our otherwise extremely poor soils. Knowing this, being able to say it with numbers, gives greatly needed ammunition to protect the salmon runs from damns, logging and farming erosion, overfishing by humans, etc..

Um, ever heard of a buffalo jump? Also, most of the NA landscape was highly managed, not wild, by the time europeans came. They had the science of using fire to increase game stocks, and to keep prairies from becoming forest, down pat, and fires kill innocent bystanders. Their living so well 'in peace with nature' had a lot to do with the limits of stone age technology, and that not many native species could be domesticated, which in turn kept the population low and impacts smaller (read "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond.) I expect that if it came down to it, you wouldn't choose to live that life. As much as I hate dentists, I'd hate to be without one, and the associated high-speed drill and pain killers, when needed!

No, what I said applies to every consumer, which is everyone on the planet to some extent, though especially to those of us living in countries rich enough that almost anyone can own fancy digital cameras.

Do you drive a car? Then you directly kill hundreds of bugs every time you drive it, and indirectly you killed millions, and many vertebrates too, because of the habitat loss and pollution caused by: mining to get the ores; smelting ores to get the metals; oil production to get the plastics and rubbers, fuel and fuel additives; global warming from the fuel used to transport all of that stuff and drive yourself and a ton of metal to the store; direct habitat loss and habitat fragmentation due to road building; landfills to shove the non-recyclable dead car bits into later. (Driving cars also kills people, and not just from accidents. In the US, about 60000 people a year die of respiratory problems caused by auto exhaust.) The same for everything else you buy. It all comes from somewhere, gets processed somehow, and ends up somewhere else after you're finished with it, with sideways implications all along the line. It's not the evil corporations killing the planet, or the mad scientists--it's everyone who buys from the corporations, which encourages them to go out provide more of whatever the consumers are asking for, no matter the ultimate costs.

Have you ever taken antibiotics? Had surgery? Would you refuse anti-cancer drugs because they've been tested for safety on animals? Do you take any drugs at all, including caffeine or ibuprofen? Most of them are excreted intact and seriously pollute surface and ground waters.

I know you're enjoying those wonderful insect books you bought not long ago. Do you think they could have been made without extensive collecting of the insects described?

As for my own learning and research, by going down deeper than superficial 'aren't bugs cute?', I can do a significantly better job of restoration on my minuscule bit of property. If I just let it 'go back to nature', it wouldn't. It would 'go back' only to the present--to invasive Eurasian weeds, of little use to anything but invasive Eurasian bugs. By doing some research and planting the right species of plants, from local genetic stock when possible, that are liked by species that are typical for this area and habitat type--and actually present close enough to migrate to me--I can hope to help out at least a few of the vanishing natives.

And maybe harder than you think. The better my little habitat gets, the less time any given dead body hangs around; it's extremely rare to find one and I do look. Without going to special efforts such as pit traps and tearing rotting wood apart, which I haven't done much of, I don't even have a chance at seeing live ones from many groups. The bugs that we see flitting about are only scratching the surface; most are much more reclusive. Which wouldn't be known if it weren't for curious scientists.

I'm sorry if I sound like I'm picking on you in particular, I'm not. I'm picking on the society/culture I'm stuck with, and being more than usually irritated at all the soccer moms around here who think that using an SUV to drive little Jimmy to practice is a 'personal choice' that doesn't affect others.

OFF TOPIC!

It's all relative, imagine all the power needed to host and access this cool site. Instead of saying "off topic" and neverthemind, go on wondering about how many things die inadvertently because of your daily rutine, compare that to things you kill advertenlty in order to sustain your daily rutine. You are a death machine, from the time you were born, you kill and die the whole time. How you think and how act to suite your thoughts and ideal is all you can hope to change. Protect the enjoyment of our time alive and for the time of others to come. The more you use and waste away and kill, the less there is for your successors to enjoy. And the terrible things that will happen to rectify the horrible things we have already done. Wait a second, did I just say rectify???

You're right... I just got ready for work and killed a whole bunch of organisms in the process... mouthwash, soap... those poor litle bacteria... What a murderous bastard I am lol

Salticid has a very valid point. While I'm not of the same opinion about taking samples, he's right - it's not entomologists that wipe out insect species, but farmers, city planners, lumber industry and so on that damage or destroy habitats.

OFF TOPIC as in "Go start your own thread to discuss what is important to you."

OFF TOPIC as in "Has nothing to do with the topic of conversation started by the original post of this thread."

Neverthemind as in "How do I close a thread when it is hijacked by emotional non-photographic discussions?"

Bill - you're asking if we kill, subue, stun or leave said insects alone. We've answered that and expressed our feelings on killing or maiming insects for the photograph. It seems that the vast majority of those that voted and posted in the thread didn't find killing/maiming the insect satisfactory. We also discussed the morals of killing said animals/insects etc for scientific entomological purposes, which are intertwined with insect photography I might add. I'd venture to say that they're on topic. Of course, what's off topic and on topic and post deletion etc is up to the mods, not you or me.

Dave

I don't have any moral problems about killing bugs in the house, but I won't do it outside or for a picture.

Well, I'd kill a tick if I saw one.