Our love, their loss
Not that this blog is about to morph into answers.com, but here's a trivia question anyway; what's the most expensive stamp in the world, and why?
If you go by prices paid at auction, the answer is the Swedish Treskilling Yellow. In 1996, someone paid $2.3m to own one; because it is, almost certainly, the Treskilling Yellow - the only one in existence.
Humans love rarity. Shop-keepers trying to shift a sale bargain never put notices in their windows advertising "only 375 left - hurry while stocks are plentiful", and I've not seen a holiday company yet that promises "the kind of experience you can get pretty much anywhere at any time, if we're honest".
A few years ago, French biologist Franck Courchamp suggested that it might be human nature to see animals and all wild things in the same light; and that this might spell bad news for those animals and other wild things.
As something beautiful or tasty or especially useful becomes rare, the value we put on it will rise. That will make harvesting said creature even more profitable, hastening its exploitation and probably its extinction.
Dr Courchamp's latest piece of research dropped onto my metaphorical mat this week, and it contains more evidence that rare species do have, in his words, a "fatal attraction" - fatal for them, that is, not for us.
So picture the scene. You're in Paris in the spring, and with everything bursting into bloom you decide to indulge your taste for natural things by paying a visit to La Menagerie du Jardin des Plantes.
The zoo has a research arm, and most of its time is devoted to studying other animals; but this time, you are the subject.
Here, Dr Courchamp's team has laid before you two tanks containing chipmunks, one labelled "rare" and the other "common"; they are in fact the same species.
There, you spot a door with a notice saying you'll have to pay extra to see the animal inside, which is said either to be rare or common.
And on the table are two jars containing identical seeds, but one jar is labelled as a rare species and the other is common; which are you going, surreptitiously, to put in your pocket and walk off with?
In all of these situations, it's your behaviour that's being monitored. And it turns out that at every turn, visitors valued the rare over the common.
They would spend more time looking at or looking for an animal if they were told it was rare; they would walk up more flights of stairs, spend more money, or get wetter and colder to reach its cage, and run a greater risk of being caught stealing a seed - all because of that four-letter word.
So what Franck Courchamp has dubbed the anthropogenic Allee effect does seem to hold true. But visiting a zoo isn't generally an activity that's going to bring animals closer to extinction, notwithstanding the concerns there are over the welfare implications of keeping some species in some zoos.
I called him up for a chat. It turned out I'd missed his previous paper in which his collaborators had posed as waiters at a (presumably quite plush) party, offering people canapes of caviar said to be either from rare or common species.
Guess which one people said tasted better?
Now we have the beginnings of a route to extinction. If people think they prefer the taste of the rare species (the "two varieties" in the experiment were actually the same, so it's clearly our psychology that's making the difference), then that caviar will command a higher price than the other, and fishermen will seek the sturgeon that makes it.
In the pet trade, it's already happening. I had a chat to Robin Moore, an amphibian specialist with Conservation International, who confirmed what you might have guessed - the rarer the frog (or newt or salamander), the more money it'll fetch.
Stepping outside the amphibian realm, he told me of a case where the sum of around $100,000 had been offered for a blue form of the (usually green) emerald boa snake, just because the blue ones are rare.
The world's biggest amphibian, the Chinese giant salamander, is a particularly interesting case, though for the most part people aren't looking to keep it but to eat it.
Hunting this critically endangered species is now banned; but there seems to be a way of getting some on your plate if you can pay enough. A recent study found the price per kilo had risen about by a factor of 20 in as many years.
(In a neat tie-in with a previous post, the specimens caught are apparently getting smaller too.)
You might think that hunters and traders would have an interest in keeping a sustainable population of these creatures alive so they have something to hunt for years to come.
But the economics don't work like that.
In the first place, they can always hunt other things if they run out of salamanders, so their living won't disappear. Secondly, they're competing with each other in a declining, unregulated market; and thirdly, as Colin Clark demonstrated decades ago with whaling, you may make more money long-term by hunting something lucrative to extinction and banking the proceeds at a healthy interest rate than you can by preserving your prey for future seasons.
To what extent the whale trade existed because of demand was, and continues to be, a contentious subject; but there's no doubt that in the world of collecting, desire is everything.
In Japan, keeping stag beetles is a growing hobby, and rare species from other parts of Asia can command thousands of dollars [pdf link] in this specialist market.
In fact, so much do we (or some of us, at any rate) desire these scarce things that some organisations are starting to be more careful about publicising the rarity of anything that could be collected. The paradox is that only by publicising it can they raise a wider awareness that could prevent the coup de grace.
Are we loving some species to death, turning them first into the conservation equivalent of the Treskilling Yellow, and then sending them down the path of the golden toad?
If Franck Courchamp is right, one road to extinction has been clearly signposted in the pretty boulevards of La Menagerie du Jardin des Plantes.
I'm Richard Black, environment correspondent for the BBC News website. This is my take on what's happening to our shared environment as the human population grows and our use of nature's resources increases.
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~45~RS~)
Comments
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This a very important issue that has troubled me for many years. The same can be observed in the bush meat trade in Africa. The rarer the animal, the more wealthy consumers who attach status to eating game as opposed to meat from domestic animals, are willing to pay for it.
Is it a question of human nature or just a cultural bias caused by our so-called civilized way of life? The answer to that one still escapes me.
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Maybe we should look at this rarity thing in the context of the war on drugs. The more we fight drugs and make them more rare then the more people will want them and therefore the entire effort is lost to human nature. People will want the thing that they cannot have (or are not supposed to have) and will go through greater extremes to get what they want. The drug war will never go away until all people go away.
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@jimigorilla
I agree with most of what you say, although I think it's more likely to be human nature to show off how rich / powerful the person is.
Today we have rare meats, rare stamps, expensive homes and cars to show off with, but it has always been the case that the wealthy and powerful have needed to show just how wealthy and powerful they are.
From the Egyptian Pharaoh's to the footballer with 8 Ferrari's in his garage, it's just the same.
It's a real shame and I agree with Richard on this, but I'm not sure there is a way to stop the trade. There will always be the rich wanting the next best thing and there will always be the poacher willing to provide it - at a cost.
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CuckooToo
The examples you supply are all what most people would call members of a more or less advanced civilizations (Egyptian civilization supposedly being quite advanced compared to what went on before.) I think it is mainly a way of asserting one´s social status. Aspiring to status probably is an essential part of human nature, but the way we acquire status is culturally defined, surely?
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Maybe the answer lies in part in exploiting the phenomena. Prices will be a function of what the market can bear. As with the stock market, it is less what something is worth, but what people think other people think it is worth.
If there were to be a concerted effort to generate a lot of "noise" - collapsing the value of what is actually rare by making it appear common, and inflating the value of what is common by making it appear rare - you can completely mangle market forces.
(Talking a given market up or down in this way is a big factor in why the global economy is currently in a mess. It follows that you can wreck black market economies with similar methods.)
Jimigorilla asks if status is culturally defined. The answer is yes, for the same reason. The ancient Egyptians valued glass above gold. We value gold above glass.
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So it´s just a matter of changing status priorities, lol. We could all start by utterly and actively despising anybody who owns more than a certain amount of luxury posessions.
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It is human nature, but environmentally speaking, it cuts both ways. We're willing to invest time and effort into preserving threatened species which in some cases are not especially interesting (at least to the typical observer) for any other reason. Is there any rare species for which you couldn't set up a conservation facility and attract visitors?
I'm not championing indifference to species conservation, incidentally, but the comparison struck me as apt.
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The other morning there was a programme about robins. The presenter cum naturalist was doing quite an intensive study on them and tagged a huge range of individuals. Then a mystery disease hit the bird population and a few hundred of the robins, both tagged and those in neighbouring areas died. My immediate thought was had the observer passed on a human disease to the birds.
A very sad case of loving something to death. If I'm right.
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@jimigorilla
i understand what you are saying and wouldn't argue with it
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On June 4, 1844, three fishermen named Jon Brandsson, Sigurdr Islefsson and Ketil Ketilsson made a trip to the Icelandic island of Eldey. They had been hired by a collector named Carl Siemsen who wanted auk specimens. Jon Brandsson found an auk and killed it. Sigurdr Islefsson found another and did the same. Ketil Ketilsson had to return empty handed because his companions had just completed the extinction of the great auk.
not a new problem sadly
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My feelings are the same as in 'jimgorilla' first comment. I've struggled with this issue all my life.
I believe the need to show status is part of human nature and that our culture determines whether it's glass or gold.
I would not go along with jimi as far as to despise those with luxury goods as in effect we despise our own human nature.
I believe there is away by citing the example of slavery. In ancient Mayan, Egyptian and more recently American history the number of slaves was a status symbol. Now there is a complete turnaround. Can we apply any lessons from this?
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11 timjenvey
Slaves were cheap and there were loads of them. In fact they were so cheap that in ancient pre Roman Britain you could trade one fo an amphora of wine on the beach with a ship that had come over from the continent to the Romans amazement, diarised somewhere. Slaves are displayed around you as possessions and used to work for you. So they are not the same as animals you eat. I do agree with your underlying message. The problem is one of perception and the answer is changing acceptability, but how you do it I do not know. I know how you can use the psychology to make something desireable but I do not have an answer as to how to reverse engineer the process. I suspect it is more about changing the culture and that is a tough one as it has to be done and takes time and the animals are vanishing. The best thing seems to be to have a way of communities getting an income from keeping them alive.
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Though not religeous myself the biblical phrase'the meek will inherit the earth' sticks out as a desirable outcome.If the decent people in the world stand up and be counted,we can stop the selfish,ignorant and greedy from destroying the planet and its life.We can start this by removing the politicians that are funded by or are- them!
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Safety in numbers? In the 1800s, the Passenger Pigeon was considered to be the most abundant bird on Earth with up to 5 billion individuals. John Audubon once observed a flock that took three days to pass. This species didn't get the chance to experience being "rare". The last bird died in captivity in 1914.
I woke up last year to find that some species of sharks were moving through that small observation window we call "rare" on their way to extinct.
www.scuble.com
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