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Not that this blog is about to morph into , 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 . 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 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 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 .

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 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 , 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) snake, just because the blue ones are rare.

The world's biggest amphibian, the , 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 [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.

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