Hi Naveen,

Thanks for your concern in protecting rare and endangered species.

Publication of research data using endangered and rare species should only be encouraged if there is a strong justification for such experiments exist for conserving the species.

It may not be always possible to find a "proxy species" for these type of experiments that closely resembles the actual organism but the organisms in question may be used as a last line of choice after gathering adequate preliminary data without performing any whole animal studies to minimize the effect on its population.

Best-

Hi Naveen,

Thanks for your concern in protecting rare and endangered species.

Publication of research data using endangered and rare species should only be encouraged if there is a strong justification for such experiments exist for conserving the species.

It may not be always possible to find a "proxy species" for these type of experiments that closely resembles the actual organism but the organisms in question may be used as a last line of choice after gathering adequate preliminary data without performing any whole animal studies to minimize the effect on its population.

Best-

Not every time the animal needs to be sacrificed. With advancement in technologies, most of the studies can be done without sacrificing the animals. Moreover if we don't do research on rare/endangered species, then how can we take up suitable measures for their conservation.

There is always a difference in "proxy species" and the real animal species that we are dealing with.

Scientists must be ethical when conducting experiments and carry out a cost-benefit analysis before proceeding, i.e. do the potential benefits of the research far outweigh the cost to the organism. The same consideration must be applied for destructive sampling. There is little benefit to the species if experimentation results in population or species extinction or, indeed, unnecessary harm to the individual organism.

From the viewpoint of journals, most respectable peer-review journals require authors to submit an ethical statement and perhaps this needs to be applied more broadly. However, the responsibility cannot lie with journals to encourage ethical experimentation - that is our responsibility as researchers and this can be ensured by the oversight of our colleagues and peers.

In any case, if an experiment has been carried out on an endangered species, the harm has already been done and if the resulting publication is not published, then no good will have come from the death or harm to the organism at all.

As our colleagues rightly mentioned above, all depends of what experiments you are thinking of. I guess that you are excluding here morphological and taxonomic studies? For these latter studies sacrifices of specimens are in most cases a necessity, and a requirement in the guidelines of most taxonomic journals. For other studies, the question is mostly if the sacrifice of some specimens has an impact on the remaining population of that given species, and if this impact is balanced or not by positive outcomes from the study regarding the conservation of the species. You won’t be able to forbid all journals from all over the world to publish research involving sacrifices of specimens of endangered species – while some journals have very strict ethical rules in this matter, others don’t, and you will always find a place to publish your manuscript. Influencing journals is thus probably not the solution. Modifying protection laws about these species in the countries (country) where they occur would be much more efficient. If collecting specimens of these endangered species is not allowed, then these studies will simply not be made and won’t be published. It can then be the decision of national environmental authorities to exceptionally allow collection of specimens if the research project clearly shows that there will be positive conservation outcomes. This already works this way for many protected species in numerous countries.

I personally don´t like strict bans in science. The main responsibility always lies on the researcher and he/she should be the one infomend enough to make a decision. Even ethical commisions often consist of people with limited insight in specifics, especially in case of rare or endangered species. I am not telling everything should be free, but research should not be blocked, as it may bring information that could contirbute to acctual conservation of the population on the expense of death to some individuals. Also general bans on destructive experiments on protected species would stop any scientific use of the captive bred individuals - there are many species extremly rare in situ, whileabundant and easy to breed in captivity (e.g. Ambystoma mexicanum).