Citation: Byrne AQ (2023) Response to “Specimen collection is essential for modern science”. PLoS Biol 21(11): e3002390. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002390

Received: August 21, 2023; Accepted: October 17, 2023; Published: November 22, 2023

Copyright: © 2023 Allison Q Byrne. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The author received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.

In my original perspective, I introduced the term “compassionate collection” to describe a practice that would involve a pivot towards nonlethal collections for natural history museums [1]. I specifically use the term compassion—to suffer with—to describe a relationship between scientists and the animals they study that recognizes animal lives as deeply meaningful; that the unique expression of lizard, or beetle, or bird that we encounter has significant value. It is my belief that if we open our hearts to this compassionate channel, we could be motivated to think creatively about how to preserve animal lives without abandoning our own curiosity about their world (which is often fueled by the same sense of wonder). This invitation has been met with resistance [2].

I recognize that my perspective and call for compassionate collection is born from my own personal journey of finding a way of doing good science without taking animal lives. For me, this has looked like developing new methods to optimize non-invasive DNA samples [3] and avoiding animal experimentation. While I agree that many past scientific discoveries made by virtue of lethal collections are important, I also think we have a responsibility to reflect on the ethical frameworks we are using when we decide how we conduct our science. My perspective was an invitation to have conversations about the hard ethical choices we must make when we decide whether to sacrifice animal lives. Therefore, when Nachman and colleagues chose to avoid the ethical dimensions of this issue in their response [2], I believe they missed the heart of the matter.

Nachman and colleagues reach the conclusion that nonlethal collections will unquestionably limit future scientific possibilities, a statement with which I disagree. For example, included in Nachman and colleagues’ list are discoveries made using collections-based wildlife surveys [4] and skin swabs from collections [5], both of which have potential nonlethal alternatives going forward that could provide even better data about animals and ecosystems than lethal sampling strategies. Wildlife surveys can be conducted through nonlethal means using a variety of techniques (e.g., visual encounter surveys, camera traps, audio recorders, environmental DNA sampling) that provide more robust occupancy data and have the potential for revealing behavioral and community level insights while leaving animal populations intact [6,7]. Skin swabs taken from live animals provide for more accurate pathogen detection than those taken after formalin-fixation [8]. As stated in my original piece, part of the compassionate collection approach would involve shifting priorities to build capacity to better accommodate these types of samples and the costs associated with collecting and storing them [1].