A recent analysis made on Cerambycids sold by a local seller as collected in "Saraburi" during the late 80s years revealed that they are all Malayan or even Bornean species.
Moreover, the collection dates correspond to a season where no insect can be found on flowers in southern Thailand.
The "impossibility" to find such species in Saraburi is confirmed by the fact that Chrysomelidae collected in Saraburi in the 50s years (Kimoto & Gressitt, 1979; 1981) does not include Bornean species, but only Indo-Chinese ones.
This problem concerns many species recorded as new for Thailand and even new species, whose original locality is "Saraburi".
The same problem can also concern all other group of insects subject to commercial trade, with patent biogeographic and/or taxonomic dramatic consequences..
Do you have further informations?
http://www.cerambycoidea.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=23561
Sabine Steinke is the wife of Hilmar Lehmann. They lived in Saraburi/Nakhon Rachasima area back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were dealing in insects, and I should say that their data should be treated with some suspicion.
As for Chiang Mai, which is where I have lived for more than 30 years, sometimes well-meaning Japanese collectors have given local catchers specimens from elsewhere as a gift, and of course they just take them to the dealers in town but don't tell them how they obtained them, so the dealers assume they caught them in the forest. I know of another instance where a researcher bought specimens from a dealer in Chiang Mai back in 1966 and recently these became type specimens of a non-existant new subspecies from northwestern Thailand. Unfortunately the dealer must have obtained these from eastern Thailand and not told the buyer, who assumed they came from Chiang Mai, but that species does not occur in NW Thailand at all.
One time a dealer called me asking why one of their collectors from Wiang Papao brought a specimen of Graphium phidias (an Annamese Mts species) in for sale. After some checking I found out that a Lao collector visited from Sam Neua, where the species can be found, and brought one with him as a gift. Of course this species does not occur anywhere near Thailand, it is only found on the mountains bordering Laos and Vietnam.
I am sure this can happen in many parts of the world, and caution should be exercised with data of all specimens. In fact even data of old museum specimens may be suspect, as sometimes it was falsified to protect the origin of valuable commercial material, as well as the issue mentioned above for the origin of very old material.
A more recent problem occurred with a recently deceased Chinese insect dealer who lived in Vientiane and used to sell specimens with false data in order to either sell more of them or sell them at an increased profit. I may be alluding to the same person as Michael Geiser above. This rogue dealer was well known for selling many different types of insects with false data, and unfortunately in future museum researchers will not be able to distinguish such specimens from those with reliable data. An Australian dealer once sent me some specimens of 2 species supposedly collected in Laos that he was suspicious about which came from this Chinese dealer. From the phenotype they clearly came from Sichuan. Those species do not actually occur in Laos at all, but the Chinese dealer was selling them for 5 times the price of the same specimens at source.
Last updating: CHIANG MAI may be a fake locality as well: http://www.cerambycoidea.com/forum/topic.asp?whichpage=1&TOPIC_ID=13990
It is a common practice in the illegal trafficking of wildlife to provide false collection data, often because the species are illegally collected from national parks or protected areas. You can not rely on wildlife trafficker collection data. The illegal trade in endangered species is a huge international business, which makes profits for the poachers, traffickers and traders. Most of the world’s endangered species that are threatened by trade are killed to be made into products, which are then sold illegally in other countries.
I have not met this problem with "Saraburi", but I have seen many species of Buprestidae obtained from "dealers" (even from well known, allegedly "serious" dealers!) with undoubtedly false localities (Greater Sundan species from "Chiang Mai", endemic of Sibuyan (Philippines) from "Sumatra" &c. In my opinion, labels data of "dealers'" specimens are generally irreliable and should be treated very cautiously - it is a great pity that they make increasingly great proportion of material in many collections (collecting by scientists becomes increasingly difficult due to legal restrictions...) and are often not recognizable as such!
This is very common situation not only with insects traders but also with snails traiders. They offer species from remote Papuan islands or inaccessible parts of New Guinea, but if you are an expert you can clearly see theae species are not what is expected from these regions.
I would never base my taxonomic research and descriptions of new taxa on a material bought from commercial collectors
"I would never base my taxonomic research and descriptions of new taxa on a material bought from commercial collectors " - you are perfectly right, Dmitry, but the problem is that in any (also institutional) collections there are many specimens, obtained (directly or indirectly) from "dealers", but not easily (or at all...) recognizable as such. Moreover, if they represent new (or rare but widely distributed) taxa, you have even no reliable evidence that the occurrence in the alleged locality is impossible... In the time when collection in or "export" from more and more countries is restricted or prohibited, dealers become nearly the only source of new material for study, and so more and more often we have only the choice whether to base our study on "suspect" material or... resign from taxonomic/biogeographic studies...
Most of those data, from November to March, were evidently fake data for small species usually found on tree flowers between April to June; why and how ignoring such a clue ?
Some data are evidently wrong, and should be ignored, but unfortunately not all cases are so evident: if I find in a collection a specimen from. according to the label, e.g. Mindoro, belonging to a rare species known from few localities in, say, Malay Peninsula, Borneo and Celebes, how can I be sure that the locality is false? Such situations make the truly serious problem!
I think that doubtful data should be used very prudently, but renouncing to publish new entities on material bought from international sellers seems to me exaggerated.
In the linked topic, the scarce number of specimens (consequently, our knowledge) suggested the possibility to describe a new species at the beginning.
Afterwards, we followed the most realistic solution (fake data), without trying with all means to find "some novelty".
I think that the Occam's razor should be taken into account.
http://www.cerambycoidea.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=7948
Is/was "Tibet" a false locality as well?
http://www.cerambycoidea.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=23693
There is a specimen of Prionocerus opacipennis (Pic, 1920) (Prionoceridae) labelled as coming from "Saraburi" and collected by S. Steinke. This species is otherwise only known from Sumatra and the Mentawai islands.
At the time when I did my revision of Prionocerus (published 2010 in Zootaxa), I didn't list it as a "dubious" record, because the distribution of that species was rather poorly known. Now, 3000 Prionocerus specimens later, and after having seen recent, more reliable material from Saraburi prov., I think that this is very likely a case of mislabelling, maybe even done deliberately!
Chiang Mai is a different case. It's a major centre of the insect trade in Thailand, and many entomologists, as well as dealers and "local collectors" have been active there (not basically just one dealer, like in Saraburi in the 1980ies/90ies). I wouldn't consider everything from Chiang Mai as suspicious, but of course it's entirely possible that a few of the specimens from dealers and local collectors have wrong data. Never such a high proportion as in Saraburi, though!
In the case of the mislabelled Tibetan material, it is really down to one particular dealer, who has been known to sell beetles with fake or at least dubious localities! For example, this particular dealer was once offering a lot of beetles allegedly collected from a remote mountain in Myanmar, which contained a Carabus species endemic to Mt. Phou Pan in Laos!
There is no point in treating all material from Tibet or Chiang Mai as questionable. Rather watch out for a few particular collectors/dealers, who have a bad reputation!
Not only recent dealers' material (unfortunately, as I have already mentioned, not always recognizable as such!) is problematic, e.g. it has been known long since, that old (up to ca. early XX c.) labels like "Bombay", "Colombo", "Malacca", "Penang", "Java", "Manila" or "Tahiti" do not in fact mean the actual locality of collecting but only the port from where the material had been sent to Europe, so e.g. "Java" (or "Batavia") should be more or less reliably iterpreted as "Malay Archipelago", "Manila" as "Philippines", "Tahiti" as "Eastern Oceania" &c.; still older (Linnaean, Fabrician &c.) localities are practically uninterpretable at all... In my opinion, any label of a specimen not collected by myself or obtained directly from the reliable collector must be taken "cum grano salis"!
Thank you @Michael Geiser for your additional remarks.
Thank you @Roman Bohdan Hołyński. Now I understand why Acalolepta antenor (Newman, 1842), described from Manila (Luzon), was no longer collected in that northern island but nearly only from Mindanao!
Sabine Steinke is the wife of Hilmar Lehmann. They lived in Saraburi/Nakhon Rachasima area back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were dealing in insects, and I should say that their data should be treated with some suspicion.
As for Chiang Mai, which is where I have lived for more than 30 years, sometimes well-meaning Japanese collectors have given local catchers specimens from elsewhere as a gift, and of course they just take them to the dealers in town but don't tell them how they obtained them, so the dealers assume they caught them in the forest. I know of another instance where a researcher bought specimens from a dealer in Chiang Mai back in 1966 and recently these became type specimens of a non-existant new subspecies from northwestern Thailand. Unfortunately the dealer must have obtained these from eastern Thailand and not told the buyer, who assumed they came from Chiang Mai, but that species does not occur in NW Thailand at all.
One time a dealer called me asking why one of their collectors from Wiang Papao brought a specimen of Graphium phidias (an Annamese Mts species) in for sale. After some checking I found out that a Lao collector visited from Sam Neua, where the species can be found, and brought one with him as a gift. Of course this species does not occur anywhere near Thailand, it is only found on the mountains bordering Laos and Vietnam.
I am sure this can happen in many parts of the world, and caution should be exercised with data of all specimens. In fact even data of old museum specimens may be suspect, as sometimes it was falsified to protect the origin of valuable commercial material, as well as the issue mentioned above for the origin of very old material.
A more recent problem occurred with a recently deceased Chinese insect dealer who lived in Vientiane and used to sell specimens with false data in order to either sell more of them or sell them at an increased profit. I may be alluding to the same person as Michael Geiser above. This rogue dealer was well known for selling many different types of insects with false data, and unfortunately in future museum researchers will not be able to distinguish such specimens from those with reliable data. An Australian dealer once sent me some specimens of 2 species supposedly collected in Laos that he was suspicious about which came from this Chinese dealer. From the phenotype they clearly came from Sichuan. Those species do not actually occur in Laos at all, but the Chinese dealer was selling them for 5 times the price of the same specimens at source.
This is why I am avoiding buying specimens from any dealers. It can cause real problems in biogeography.
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