Especially of insects, No. If a number of insect species were really rare in the wild in terms of low number of individuals, they would have become extinct alone - as they couldn't find easily an opposite sex individual to mate and reproduce - and wouldn't wait for a collector-entomologist to do this. ''Rare'' in insects actually is ''hard to find in the wild'', cause of lack of knowledge on their biology or behavior, of difficult to approach/dangerous habitat, etc. All insect species at the right habitat form big to huge populations, from tens of thousands of individuals in a locality for the rarest species, to millions per locality/population for the commonest. Below I will repeat my answer to a similar question here, a few months ago:

''Collections are absolutely necessary and valuable for science.

As proved by so many studies, habitat destruction, climatic change, the tons of pesticides and the general environmental pollution, are the real threats to biodiversity.

As far as I know, in Brazil insect collecting even for scientific purposes is almost totally prohibited (permits very hardly issued), but Bolsonaro's government is burning the Amazon -along with billions of insects- to convert the rainforest into agricultural land.

And it's a total nonsense to compare elephant populations with insect populations.

Ornithoptera alexandrae is threatened with extinction in PNG, cause a great part of its habitat has been converted into palm oil plantations, but CITES ''protects'' it from collectors, doing nothing to protect its habitat, that would be the only way to save it.

Hypocrisy mixed with ignorance..''

Especially of insects, No. If a number of insect species were really rare in the wild in terms of low number of individuals, they would have become extinct alone - as they couldn't find easily an opposite sex individual to mate and reproduce - and wouldn't wait for a collector-entomologist to do this. ''Rare'' in insects actually is ''hard to find in the wild'', cause of lack of knowledge on their biology or behavior, of difficult to approach/dangerous habitat, etc. All insect species at the right habitat form big to huge populations, from tens of thousands of individuals in a locality for the rarest species, to millions per locality/population for the commonest. Below I will repeat my answer to a similar question here, a few months ago:

''Collections are absolutely necessary and valuable for science.

As proved by so many studies, habitat destruction, climatic change, the tons of pesticides and the general environmental pollution, are the real threats to biodiversity.

As far as I know, in Brazil insect collecting even for scientific purposes is almost totally prohibited (permits very hardly issued), but Bolsonaro's government is burning the Amazon -along with billions of insects- to convert the rainforest into agricultural land.

And it's a total nonsense to compare elephant populations with insect populations.

Ornithoptera alexandrae is threatened with extinction in PNG, cause a great part of its habitat has been converted into palm oil plantations, but CITES ''protects'' it from collectors, doing nothing to protect its habitat, that would be the only way to save it.

Hypocrisy mixed with ignorance..''

I totally agree with you, Athanasios!

Hello Marcelo; In California, and in many other places, there are local endemic butterflies whose entire range may consist of only 1-2 ha. Their host plants are equally local. Because they are rare they were/are highly sought after by unscrupulous collectors in spite of strict prohibitions against collecting. Without diligent enforcement these species would surely be extinct.

It is also true that habitat loss was the primary cause of their rarity and that habitat protection and restoration would go a long way to stabilizing the species' populations. (I have deliberately not mentioned the names of these species. Best regards, Jim Des Lauriers