Author: OSUC Curator

Looking back at 2015 and moving on

 

We got back to work after a short break during the holidays.  2015 was a very busy year for us at the Triplehorn Insect Colletion. Beetles and butterflies were without a doubt the biggest highlights.  First the beetles:

As part of our Beetle Curation Project, we completed the re-housing and curation of our massive Tenebrionidae collection (65,150 specimens, now neatly housed in ten 24-drawer cabinets.)  We were able to secure funding from the National Science Foundation to cover the costs of databasing the newly curated beetles. As part of that grant, which officially started July 1, 2015, we will add 80,000 beetle specimens of the families Carabidae and Tenebrionidae to our database, and make the data available to the world via the Internet.

A newly curated drawer of darkling beetles (family Tenebrionidae)
A newly curated drawer of darkling beetles (family Tenebrionidae)
Attractive darkling beetles in the genus Eleodes (family Tenebrionidae)
Attractive darkling beetles in the genus Eleodes (family Tenebrionidae)

Beetle curation and databasing has kept us busy for a few years now and with 100+ cabinets full of beetles in our holdings, we expect this trend to continue strong for quite some time. More on our Beetle Curation Project in future posts.

Butterflies in the Parshall collection

Butterflies in the Parshall collection

Traditionally, butterflies were not one of our collection’s biggest strengths, but that has started to change. In October 2015 we were honored with the donation of the David K. Parshall Butterfly Collection. That’s a very impressive collection of butterflies, with more than 50,000 pinned specimens and probably the same amount of unmounted ones. We wrote about the collection on the collection blog here and here.  On the week we moved the Parshall collection to the museum, and before we even had a chance to take a good look at the specimens, we were already receiving inquiries and loan requests from scientists. Pretty awesome!

Apart from big curation projects and large donations, there was also a lot of what I call “regular work”: we prepared and sent out thousands of specimens on loans, we hosted various scientists who came to study and/or take photos of our specimens, and we gave many tours of the collection to people interested in learning more about insects. We were also featured in a couple of newspaper articles that recognized our efforts (here and here), and that was very nice. My modest efforts at photographing local bumblebees and contributing my images and data to bumblebeewatch.org made it to the paper too (see it here), but that’s another story.

You will notice that there’s a thread connecting the events and accomplishments at our collection: people — the staff, undergraduate student assistants, volunteers, and interns who work in the collection. Without these talented and dedicated people we could have the biggest, most amazing collection, and it wouldn’t matter one iota because it would all be locked away cabinets, completely inaccessible to the public.

I’m particularly touched by the interest and the dedication of our volunteers and interns. Their efforts made a big impact in the collection in 2015 and I want to acknowledge them here:

Sarah Washburn, a local artist and full-time e-commerce manager at a large Columbus company, joined us in April.  She has a passion for cicadas (see one of her illustrations here) and comes in whenever she has time to help out with whatever we need. Thanks to her dedication we now have a complete list of all the cicada species in the collection. She started working on updating that taxonomic names and will be continuing to work on that in 2016.

Sarah Washburn showing a drawer of cicadas to her family.
Sarah Washburn showing a drawer of cicadas to her family.
Sarah Washburn examining drawer of cicadas.
Sarah Washburn examining drawer of cicadas.

Alex DeMilto, an Entomologist interested in the curatorial process, spent a semester working 10-12 hours/week alongside our staff and other volunteers. She received training in all basic aspects of curation, from proper handling to cataloguing and organizing. Alex produced a list of all our aquatic beetle species and updated all the taxonomic names. That’s a huge task and an enormous contribution to the collection.

Volunteer Alex DeMilto working on aquatic beetles.
Volunteer Alex DeMilto working on aquatic beetles.
Volunteer Alex DeMilto working on aquatic beetles.
Volunteer Alex DeMilto working on aquatic beetles.
Aquatic beetles that were catalogued by volunteer Alex DeMilto.
Aquatic beetles that were catalogued by volunteer Alex DeMilto.

Cherokee Read-Hill, an undergraduate student from Antioch College in Yellow Spring, OH, came to us to learn about what it takes to build a scientific collection. Her goal is to build a collection of pollinators at Antioch, and she’s already working on it. During her three-month academic internship, Cherokee received training on the basics of curation, and spent a good amount of time learning the details of specimen mounting, labeling, and databasing. She worked on her own bees and on databasing part of our bees in the family Megachilidae. As part of her internship, Cherokee wrote a lovely blog post about her experience at the Triplehorn collection.

Alex and Cherokee completed their volunteering/internship programs in December. They were with us for a short period of time, but by the time they left it felt we knew them for the longest time. Their good work will serve as basis for several new curatorial projects in the months and years to come.

Lauralee Thompson, a retired lecturer at OSU, joined us in September, after seeing one of the articles about the collection on the Columbus Dispatch. She volunteers with us for 4 hours/day, three times a week and we could not be more delighted. Lauralee is energetic and very enthusiastic about our work. Since she started volunteering, she’s already made a big dent on the collection’s backlog: she moved thousands of grasshoppers and other insects to new trays and drawers. Recently she has been working on cataloguing our extensive longhorn beetles (family Cerambycidae), among other things.

Volunteer Lauralee Thompson at work at the Triplehorn Insect Collection.
Volunteer Lauralee Thompson at work at the Triplehorn Insect Collection.
Some of the specimens that Lauralee worked with in 2015.
Some of the specimens that Lauralee worked with in 2015.
Lauralee cataloguing longhorn beetles (family Cerambycidae)
Lauralee cataloguing longhorn beetles (family Cerambycidae)

Alice Vossbrinck, a PhD student in the OSU Department of Entomology, is studying lady beetles (family Coccinellidae) and wanted to get training in order to work with museum specimens. Last May she started coming in the collection one day a week for 5-6 hours. She received basic curatorial training (how to handle specimens, how to transcribe data, etc.) and started working on the lady beetle genera she is interested in. Alice moved hundreds of specimens from hard to soft-bottom unit trays, transcribed their label data, and updated their taxonomic names by looking them up in the pertinent literature.

Katherine Beigel (Art & Biology major), Cody Cardenas (Entomology major) and Zach Franczek (Geology major) are undergraduate students at OSU with an interest in biological collections. They have first joined us as volunteers and/or interns looking for learning opportunities. Their volunteer work on imaging, specimen databasing, and multiple other tasks, was an invaluable contribution. As positions and funding became available in 2015 they were all hired to work as undergraduate student assistants.

Together, all of our volunteers and interns, have contributed more than 600 hours of their time and effort to the collection between April and December 2015.  They have been instrumental in the laborious process of curation of the collection and databasing our specimen records. I’m grateful to them!

Looking back at 2015, I see the challenges we had to face, the budgetary cuts that we endured (and unfortunately will continue to endure in 2016), the loss of skilled workers due to the lack of funds, and the stress that such conditions exerted on all of us. But despite the adversities, I cannot help but marvel at all our many accomplishments, and to feel excited about all the wonderful things we have coming up in 2016.  Stay tuned for more on that!

Happy New Year!

 

About the Author: Dr. Luciana Musetti is an Entomologist and Curator of the Triplehorn Insect Collection.

Little Beaver Creek Annual Snorkeling Trip – Guest post by Brian Zimmerman

 

Since 2010 I have been visiting the last series of rapids in Little Beaver Creek in eastern Ohio just before that stream flattens out to the pool level of the Ohio River and joins it. This particular site is interesting because it lies near the junction of Ohio, PA, and WV and is a high quality stream in terms of habitat and water quality.  In the past 2-3 decades we have witnessed the re-expansion of several rare or water quality sensitive fish species in the upper Ohio River basin.  Much of this expansion appears to have started in the Allegheny River basin in PA and Little Beaver Creek represents the first system in Ohio that may be a place expansion of such species from PA can be witnessed in Ohio.

I first visited that location on a hunch that the (at the time) state threatened Bluebreast Darter (Etheostoma camurum) might be present in the area.   That fish was de-listed in 2012 because its expansion here and other places in Ohio was so great.

I had attempted to use the more conventional sampling method of kick seining for this species in that area, but because of the abundance of very large rocks, it did not work.  I decided to try to snorkel there in the Autumn, when the water is often at its lowest and clearest.  Given the temperature of the water (upper 50’s), I had to wear a a full body wet suit in order to use that observation method.

Brian Zimmerman & Justin Baker kick seining at Little Beaver Creek.
Snorkeling is a method used to observe & collect fish specimens in shallow waters.

On that first trip on October 1st 2010, I observed Bluebreast Darters within 5 minutes of starting the snorkeling observations.  That was the first record of the species in that location and the first for the whole river basin of more than a single individual caught in 1998 by Ohio EPA.  Our team, two colleagues and I, snorkeled for 5 hours that first trip and also saw the state threatened Tippecanoe Darter (Etheostoma tippecanoe) for the first time ever in that river system.

Since then I have made this an annual trip near the end of September or early October. I have also made observations by seining and other methods further up this stream system.  In 2010 we only saw the Bluebreast Darter at the lower end of the ~100 yard series of rapids.  To date I have found them as far as 12 miles upstream in Little Beaver Creek and they are now very common in that last series of rapids.  They are also fairly common in the lower 6-7 miles of the stream in most riffles.  I have also seen the Tippecanoe Darter increase in numbers some but not as dramatically.  In 2015 I found a single Tippecanoe Darter each 2 miles and 4 miles upstream from that location.

I have also observed other new species for the basin. In 2014 I found Streamline Chub (Erimystax dissimilis) for the first time ever and Bigeye Chub (Hybopsis amblops) for the first time in nearly 50 years in that river system.  This year was no exception as far as finding new species. I once again observed both darters mentioned above and both chubs were more abundant than last year.  In addition to these, I observed the first state endangered Gilt Darter (Percina evides) ever found in a tributary to the Ohio River in Ohio.  This species was thought to be entirely extirpated from Ohio, having only been found prior to 1900 in the Ohio River and Maumee River.  None were seen in Ohio at all for over 100 years until it was rediscovered in 2010 in the Ohio River near Gallipolis, OH by an environmental consulting company.  After this first individual, I found 13 more in the Ohio River over the past several years, but this 14th (15th overall since rediscovery) specimen was the first not in the Ohio River itself.  Also this year I observed two Channel Darters (Percina copelandi), also a state threatened species, that is a little more common in the Ohio River main channel.

All of these new observations make me want to return each year to see what I may come across next.  It is exciting to witness first hand the re-expansion of these once very rare fish into new places.  This is the overall trend with moderate to large river fish species in Ohio.  And now the smaller, less mobile species of fish are also moving and colonizing new areas.  The general consensus is that this is the result of the Clean Water Act from 1972, plus other regulations and efforts to clean and protect our waterways.  It took more than 40 years for us to observe the impact of these conservation efforts in the fish population of Ohio rivers.

 

About the Author:  Brian Zimmerman is Research Associate at the ‘Stream and River Ecology (STRIVE) Lab’ in the School of Environment and Natural Resources & Field Collections Coordinator in the ‘Fishes of Ohio Inventory and Distribution Project’ of the Fish Division.

Museum Open House Photo Album

 

With the 12th Museum Open House coming up on April 23, 2016, I thought it would be fun and instructive to look back at the previous events. I asked everyone in the building to share their photos and here are some of the best. I hope you will enjoy.

In case you would like to learn more about our Museum Open House, please visit the event page on the MBD website. We are building a historic record of our Open House and have already added a brief summary page for seven of the previous eleven iterations of the event.

2005 – 2006 – 2007

 

Robin Taylor and Woody Foster in the Tetrapod Collection. 2005
Tom Watters (right) with visitor at the Mollusc Collection, 2005
John Spohn, OSU alum, volunteering in the Triplehorn Insect Collection. 2006
Visitors appreciate butterfly displays at the Triplehorn Insect Collection. 2006
Chuck Triplehorn with young entomologist. 2006
Hans Klompen with young visitor looking at mites under the microscope. 2006
Joe Cora with young visitor at the Triplehorn Insect Collection. 2007
Tom Hetherington and son examine bugs in goo at the Triplehorn Insect Collection. 2007
Zeynep Benderlioglu and family check out the first animal sound kiosk of the Borror Lab. 2007
Interactive animal sound kiosk at the Tetrapod Collection. 2007

 

2008 Alien Invaders | 2009 Voyages of Discovery

 

Light box with images of various insects at the Triplehorn Collection. 2008
Super hero stopped by the Triplehorn Insect Collection to check out the tiny wasps on display. 2008
Chuck Triplehorn and some of the displays of the Triplehorn Insect Collection. 2008
Butterfly displays prepared by Sara Hemly. 2008
Animal sound kiosk on display by the Borror Lab in the Auditorium. 2009
Volunteer Tom Silver answering questions by visitor. 2009
Grad student volunteer Elijah Talamas with young visitor at the Bug Drawing Table. 2009
Rich Bradley talking spiders with visitors. 2009
Rich Bradley addresses visitor’s questions about spiders. 2009

 

2010 Symbiosis |  2011 Extreme Biodiversity

 

Large banner welcomes Museum Open House visitors. 2010
Scenery outside of the Museum on the day of the Open House. 2010
Theme “Symbiosis” display in the Auditorium. 2010
Student volunteer Erica Szeyller in the auditorium. 2010
Visitor at the Triplehorn Insect Collection, with Norman Johnson. 2010
Cheetah skeleton in the Tetrapod collection. 2010
Examining insect displays from above. 2011
Visitors check out an insect display in the Triplehorn collection. 2011
Insect drawing by one of the Triplehorn Insect Collection volunteers. 2011
Theme “Extreme Biodiversity” display in the Auditorium. 2011
Tom Watters with visitors at the Mollusc collection. 2011
The Bug Drawing Table in the Triplehorn Insect Collection. 2011

 

From the 2012 Museum Open House on, the number of photos available skyrockets. There are so many great images! I’ll have to continue sorting through the lot and later add another post with more photos.

By the way, did you see yourself or somebody you know on the photos?  If yes, please drop me a note to let me know. I’m trying to annotate the photos as I go along for future record. Thank you!

 

About the Author: Dr. Luciana Musetti is the Curator of the Tripehorn Insect Collection and a wannabe photographer.

Photo credits: This batch of photos came from ASC Communications (2005), Rich Bradley (spider displays), Luciana Musetti and Charuwat Taekul (Triplehorn Insect Collection), Angelika Nelson (Borror Lab, Tetrapod Collection, Auditorium, Outdoors)

 

Museum Open House 2.0

 

Mark your calendars: 2016 Museum Open House – Saturday, April 23rd

Those who are familiar with the Museum of Biological Diversity Open House have probably heard say that we are the largest outreach event in the College of Arts & Sciences at Ohio State. That’s a delight for the people who put the event together, and a big responsibility too.

The Open House started way back in 2005 with a two-day special event celebrating the Museum and the university’s biological collections. The program started on Friday, April 29, with lectures from various Museum alumni, from ichthyologists to botanists to entomologists, and continued with a reception and dedication of the OSU Insect Collection in honor of its long time curator, Dr. C. A. Triplehorn. The first day of the program closed with a lecture by Dr. Peter Raven entitled “How Many Species Will Survive the 21st Century?”

Speakers at the 2005 Museum celebration

Speakers at the 2005 Museum celebration

On Saturday afternoon the Museum opened its doors and welcomed the public for guided tours of the facility and hands-on activities. The event was a success and motivated the people in the Museum to hold an Open House the next year, and the next, and on for the past 11 years.

As the event grew, new activities were added, more volunteers joined in, and our audience increased.  Over the last three years (2013-2015) the event attendance more than doubled. We welcomed over 2,700 visitors in 2015. That’s an average of 450 people per hour for a 6 hour event — a manageable number, assuming that the audience is evenly distributed throughout the total hours of the event. However, that’s not the case: most of the Open House visitors come in between 11AM and 2PM, only three hours. During this period we reached a peak of more than 700 people in the building at one time. That turned out to be a bit too cozy for comfort.

View of the Museum auditorium during the 2014 Open House

View of the Museum auditorium during the 2014 Open House

 

Our enthusiastic visitors tell us they would like less crowds and suggest a two-day event, or maybe more than one Open House a year. We wish we could, friends, we really do, but we cannot. We don’t have the staff or the resources to hold more than the one day Open House each year.

Because we do not have dedicated display areas, in order to welcome our guests during Open House, we have to free up space and move furniture and equipment that are normally used for research and curation. After the event, we need to put all that stuff back in place before we can return to our daily work routine.

Setting up a display at the Triplehorn Insect Collection

Setting up a display at the Triplehorn Insect Collection

In the insect collection, which is what I know best, it takes us roughly 2 months to plan and prepare displays and activities for the yearly Open House, plus one week to move furniture, do some cleaning, and set up displays, plus one week to take everything down and put it all away.

And there’s the toll on our people, the Museum staff and the dedicated volunteers that make the Open House the amazing event it is. For us, Open House is an exhilarating experience: we plan it, we work really hard to make it happen, we’re proud of it. On the day of the event we get up early and we spend at least 6 hours straight standing on our feet, talking, running activities, interacting with our guests. We love it, we give it all we have, but at the end of the afternoon we’re completely and utterly exhausted, our feet hurt, our voices are gone … and there’s still work to be done after the doors close.

In response to the success of the event, and the consequent overcrowding, and taking into consideration our own limitations, we decided to try something different for next year. If we cannot hold longer, or multiple Open Houses, we thought we would hold the event a little later in the year to avoid the cold and the snow and move some of the activities outside.

We picked Saturday, April 23rd as the date for the 2016 Museum Open House. Some of the hands-on activities that do not involve fragile museum specimens will be set up at the large Museum front yard, while our weather-sensitive specimens, displays, and activities will be available in the auditorium and in the collections.

Will this new formula work for our event? We hope it will, but the proof is in the pudding. So please plan on joining us this spring, April 23, (the day after Earth Day!), to learn more about our Museum, our impressive collections, and about the breathtaking biodiversity of the world we live in.

 

About the Author: Dr. Luciana Musetti is Curator of the C. A. Triplehorn Insect Collection.

Museum specimens going online

 

Skipper butterflies (Erynnis martiallis) are some of the specimens being digitized and imaged at the Triplehorn Insect Collection

Skipper butterflies (Erynnis martiallis) are some of the specimens being digitized and imaged at the Triplehorn Insect Collection

We open the doors to our collections once a year for the Museum Open House and thousands of people from all over the state and beyond stream through our building to marvel over our specimens. Many of them express interest in re-visiting soon.

How amazing would it be to allow people access to our specimens every day at any time? With easy access to the World Wide Web it is possible and natural history museums are digitizing their collections and making their specimens freely available online.

Digitization of plant specimens in the OSU Herbarium.

Digitization of plant specimens in the OSU Herbarium.

Curatorial staff take high quality, ideally 3-D images of each specimen, add metadata and upload them to an online database. This process is labor- and time-intensive, but well worth the effort.

You can read about Museum Specimens Find(ing) New Life Online in this recent New York Times article (10/20/2105.)  And please stay tuned to learn more about specific digitizing efforts going on right here in the collections housed at the OSU Museum of Biological Diversity.

 

About the authors: Angelika Nelson (Borror Lab of Bioacoustics) & Luciana Musetti (Triplehorn Insect Collection) collaborated on this post.

Going where the wasps are.

 

On the previous post we talked a bit about visits to the Museum of Biological Diversity and more specifically to the Triplehorn Insect Collection. Today I want to turn around and show you what we see & do when we put our ‘research scientist‘ hats and go visit other collections.

There’s no walk-ins when it comes to visiting research collections. Setting up an appointment with the curator or collection manager is a must. That allows the staff to prepare for our visit, to set up work stations for us, to review the material we are interested in, and to do curatorial work ahead of our visit if necessary.

Collections welcome research visitors because that fulfill their mission of providing service to the scientific community. In return, visiting scientists add value to the collection by providing expert identification to specimens in the collection, and many times helping out with curation and organization of the collection.

When we get to a museum or collection, the first thing we see is, of course, the door. While most public museums have imposing entrances, many times the access to very important research collections is a modest door on the side of a building. The size and type of door absolutely does not reflect the quality of the collections inside.

Once inside, we have access to the inner sanctum of the collections: rows of cabinets filled with drawers filled with dry specimens carefully separated by group; vaults containing insect specimens preserved in ethanol, waiting to be sorted to family, genus, species. And that’s when our work begins!

During a research visit we usually: 1) examine (lots and lots of) specimens, dry or wet, under the microscope, 2) add identification labels to specimens that we recognize, 3) database the specimen label data, and 4) take photos of specimens (and specimen labels). Sometimes we do only 1 and 2, other times we do mostly 3 and 4. It depends on the collection and what we are hoping to accomplish during our visit.

Over the years we had the opportunity to visit many (many!) amazing research collections in various countries. Besides the collections, their rich treasure of specimens, and their dedicated curatorial staff, we also learnt a lot about the places and the people who live there. Looking forward to our next research visit to a collection!

 

About the Author: Dr. Luciana Musetti is an entomologist and Curator of the C. A. Triplehorn Insect Collection.

Up close and personal: insects and molluscs

 

Here’s one question I get frequently from visitors: “Why, oh, why, isn’t the Museum of Biological Diversity open to everyone every day?” That’s a very good question! Here’s an answer. Unlike institutions such as the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum, the Carnegie Museum, or our neighbor the Cleveland Museum among others, our museum largely grew out of a background of higher education and research.  We have a different structure and a different mission than these other very fine institutions.  The most visible outcome of these differences is the fact that we don’t have large display areas and exhibits. We also do not have staff dedicated to public outreach. But it’s good to keep in mind that the MBD collections vary in the kinds of services they provide to the community. Each is unique in it’s own way.

My little corner of the MBD is the Triplehorn Insect Collection. We are a research facility and most of our specimens are only accessible to professional scientists and scientists in training (graduate students, postdoctoral associates, etc.)  This policy gets me in trouble with a lot of people who love insects and would like to come in to “see” (many times that means “touch”) the collection.  So, before anyone else gets hot under the collar about that, let’s try to understand what that policy means.

Dried insect specimens are as fragile as they are colorful and beautiful. The more they are handled and exposed to light and humidity, the faster and more likely they are to get damaged.  The insect specimens in the Triplehorn collection are the result of more than 100 years of careful collecting and curation, many of them were collected in forests and meadows and prairies that do not exist anymore. These specimens are, literally, irreplaceable, and it is our responsibility to keep them intact for many more long years.

Aquatic beetles.

Aquatic beetles. Part of the holdings of the Triplehorn Insect Collection.

 

Because of that, we restrict access to the specimens to only the people who must use them for scientific study, professionals who have lots of experience with museum specimens and therefore are less likely to damage our precious charges. As the curator of the collection, it is my responsibility to protect and preserve the specimens for the long run. To do that I have to enforce the “restricted access” policy.

Now, the fact that we are a research collection does not mean we don’t welcome visitors.  Quite the contrary! We are committed to sharing our knowledge and love of biodiversity with everyone interested.  While we don’t have exhibits per se, we frequently and happily provide tours of the collection to people from the local community. Or even not so local: our audience is wide and varied, from k-12 to university classes, to family or neighborhood groups, to homeschool groups, to citizen scientists and individuals interested in local and global insect diversity.

 

Up to now we have been scheduling visits as requests come in and our time allows, but starting this month we in the insect collection will be teaming up with our colleagues in the Mollusc Division of the MBD to offer guided tours of the two collections to the general public on set dates.  This initiative comes as a response to the increased interest in the collections, demonstrated by the increase in visit requests.

Tours will still be arranged in advance, but by specifying which days are open for tours we hope to make the whole process a bit easier and more predictable. The set dates might not work for all visitors, but by working together and establishing a structure for tour activities, we hope to continue serving the community without drastically increasing the work-load of our already overworked staff.

 

The next available dates for insect collection/mollusc collection joint tours are Friday, October 23rd and Friday, November 6th, from 1pm to 4pm. Total estimated tour time for the two collections is between 45 min to 1 hour/group. Group size limit is 20 adults.  For more information or to schedule a guided tour, please contact Tom Watters or Luciana Musetti.

 

About the Author: Dr. Luciana Musetti is an entomologist and Curator of the C.A. Triplehorn Insect Collection.

Your yellow bowl is our YPT

 

Collecting insects is one of the many activities of staff and volunteers at the Triplehorn Insect Collection. Each time we go out in the field and collect we create a tiny snapshot of the insect fauna of that specific place and date.  It’s far from complete, but adds to our knowledge nonetheless. We do not need to go far to find insects that no one has ever studied before. Even in our own backyard, next door to the Museum of Biological Diversity, we find new or rare insect species and discover new facts about known species.

One of the methods we frequently use to collect small flying insects is the pan trap – a bowl with water and a drop of clear, unscented liquid soap.  The soap breaks the surface tension of the water and makes the insects sink.  The color yellow (bright yellow!) attracts many insects, including the parasitic wasps that several of us in the collection study.  Our yellow pan traps, (or YPTs for short) are simple plastic party bowls.  For best results we leave the YPTs out in the field for about 24 hours.  After that we remove the catch, and start the cycle again: fill the YPTs with water, add soap, leave for 24 hours, remove catch. We usually set up 25-50 YPTs in one spot and that’s one sample.

There are a couple of variations on how to empty the traps: scooping the specimens with a fine fish net, or pouring the content of the trap through the net. Either way the specimens get separated from the soapy water, and then are carefully washed with clean water to remove all the soap residue. Once washed, the specimens are preserved in 95% ethanol and placed in a freezer.  That slows the degradation of their DNA and allows for molecular level studies.  Later, we sort the specimens into groups (beetles, wasps, leafhoppers, etc.) and start the long process of specimen preparation for study.  The YPTs are washed and saved for the next collecting season.

Click or tap on the image to enlarge.

Collecting locality across the street from the Museum.
Collecting locality next door to the Museum.
Yellow pan traps are labeled with our name & phone number.
Set pans on the ground. Avoid direct sunlight, but don’t hide them.
Add a drop of soap to each pan trap.
Add water to each pan trap.
Add water to each pan trap, don’t overfill.
Alternatively, mix soap and water before adding to the traps. Photo by H. Clebsch.
Relax and let the YPTs work for 24 hours.
Single YPT after 24 hours in the field. Awesome catch!
Check the content of the trap, remove twigs, leaves, and other debris.
Pour (or gently scoop) the content of the trap in fine fish net. Discard soapy water.
Carefully wash the content of the yellow pan trap with clean water several times. Discard the water.
Insect specimens collected with yellow pan traps. That’s one sample.
Transfer the specimens to 95% alcohol for better preservation. Add collecting label to each sample.
Sort specimens in each sample to large groups (ex.: beetles, wasps, leafhoppers, etc.)
Sort small specimens. We need to use a microscope for that.
Wash, dry and save YPTs for next collecting season.

 

A heartfelt thanks to the people in these photos: Zach Hurley (collecting, adding soap, adding water, washing, sorting), Matt Elder (collecting), Norman Johnson (checking the catch, emptying YPT), Hans Clebsch (adding water to YPTs); and to the anonymous biker going by the Museum building.

 

About the Author: Dr. Luciana Musetti is the Curator of the Triplehorn Insect Collection at Ohio State University. All photos are courtesy of the author, except for the one of Hans Clebsch.

 

You’re an insect curator. Cool! So what is it you do?!

 

We frequently give tours of the Triplehorn Insect Collection to school groups, families, etc.  Since most entomologists like to talk about their insects, that’s usually a fun time for me.  It is also a great time to flex my General Entomology muscles.  Visitors ask lots of questions, some of them interesting (How many ants are there in an ant’s nest? Do young cicadas sing underground?), some funny (Do you eat bugs every day?), some actually very difficult to answer (How many bugs are there in the world right now, how much do they weigh, and how do you know? How come you don’t have a list of all insect species in the world?).

Open collection cabinet showing insect drawers.

Open collection cabinet showing insect drawers.

During a recent tour of the collection, after my brief intro on the history and structure of the collection, an 8-year old visitor asked me point blank: ‘If all the bugs in the collection are dead & put away in their little boxes, what do you do the whole day?’  Somebody behind me gasped, but I thought that was a good question, especially as I had just told them that we keep our specimens in cabinets, safe from humidity, light, and especially other bugs that might want to try and eat the dead specimens. So I told them that, yes, we keep the insects safe in cabinets, but that’s when they are not being used. And use them we do, a lot!

Much of what we know about the natural world comes from museum specimens. Scientists use the specimens and the data associated with them to answer many basic questions such as:

  • Where can you find this (species of) wasp? – museum specimens have labels attached to them that contain locality information.  The geographic coordinates for the locality can be plotted on a map like the one below. Data for multiple specimens of a species help us understand the geographic distribution of the species.

    Distribution of Pelecinus polyturator based on museum specimen data.

    Specimen records plotted on a map show the skewed distribution of Pelecinus polyturator, a parasitoid wasp, in North America.

  • When is the best time of the year to find that wasp? – specimen labels may contain a date of collection, which then may help pin-point the time of the year the species can be found in a specific place.
A detailed specimen label.

This label provides both detailed locality data and biological information (host species) as well.

Detailed specimen labels.

Label including geographic coordinates, altitude, type of trap, and habitat.

With locality and date of collection alone we can already learn a tremendous amount about that species of wasp.  For some areas, we can look up weather reports from that exact day and see if it was raining that day, what the average, the maximum and minimum temperatures were, also the barometric pressure, and other environmental factors that may (or may not) affect the species.

Labels may provide information on the way the specimen was collected (examples: by hand at light; using traps like a Malaise (below, middle), or yellow pans (below, right)), and the kind of vegetation (forest, grassland, prairie, etc.) encountered in the area it was collected.

Light trap

Malaise trapYellow pan trap

 

 

 

 

Sometimes labels also include information on what the specimen was feeding on, burrowing in, coming out of, what other species it was associated with, and more. It is quite amazing how much valuable information insect collectors manage to squeeze onto a tiny piece of paper!

The label information found on museum specimens is extremely valuable data for scientists trying to learn about a species and to start assessing the impact of environmental changes on living organisms.

Now, back to the young visitor’s question: ‘What do we do the whole day?’ One of the major responsibilities of a curator (= caretaker) is to make specimens and specimen data available for scientific study. That can be done either by carefully packaging and sending the specimens on loan to a scientist, or, more recently, by databasing the specimen information and making it available online to the scientific community and the general public.  Either way, that involves a lot of work, particularly in a large — we hold about 4 million dry specimens — and, relatively old — we just turned 80 in 2014 — collection like the Triplehorn.  It is not uncommon for us to loan 3,000 specimens to one scientist. The largest loan we sent out to date contained 28,000 specimens – we worked on the preparation of that loan for months!  We also welcome scientists who want to come on research visits to the collection.

So, just making the specimens and the specimen data available to the scientists is a lot of work. We could stop right there and we would still be very busy every day of the week. But we don’t stop there, oh no!  The collection keeps growing in various ways.

  • Scientists deposit voucher specimens of their research with us — that’s actually one of our main missions, to house and preserve vouchers of scientific studies so other scientists can examine those specimens if and when they need to.
  • Private insect collectors also donate their collections to us — just last month we were presented with the late Steve Sommer Collection of butterflies and moths from Ohio and the Midwest, about 1,000 specimens.
Repairing specimens.

Repairing specimens.

These new arrivals are placed in a -40°C freezer for several days to kill any potential pests that might be infesting the specimens.  Next they are examined for damage, and even sometimes fixed — broken parts are glued to a card or put away into tiny vials or gel caps. After this basic upkeep work is done, we add the specimen data into our database — sounds simple, but there are many steps to that operation, and, you guessed, a lot of work involved. Finally, we add the specimens to the main collection.

I won’t get into details of the curatorial or the databasing work here, but in case you are interested, you can read about it in the collection’s blog, the Pinning Block, and follow our  posts on our Facebook page.

Oh, and did I mention we collect?  Yes, we collect new specimens for our own research (in my case, and Dr. Johnson’s, it is parasitoid wasps), or to fill in the gaps we have in the collection. That’s a big source of growth and (guessed righ again?) more work!

Dr. Norman Johnson collecting parasitoid wasps in South Africa.

Dr. Norman Johnson, Director of the Triplehorn Insect Collection, collecting parasitoid wasps in South Africa.

Newly collected specimens are always being prepared, dried, mounted, labeled, databased, and added to the collection.  These specimens will one day be studied by scientists and maybe even be described into a new species.  In the meantime it is up to the curatorial staff of the collection to keep them safe and accessible. And that’s an entirely new post. Keep tuned!

About the Author: Dr. Luciana Musetti is the Curator of the Triplehorn Insect Collection at Ohio State University. All photos are courtesy of the author.

Thanks to Norman Johnson & Gisele de Souza da Silva for careful review and thoughtful suggestions.