Following Monday’s post, here are some illustrations of everyday life in the rest of our collections:

In the Adams lab ants are busy tending their fungi gardens. No students are working the day I stop by, but Rachelle Adams, Assistant Professor in the department of Evolution, Ecology & Organismal Biology, is happy to take a break from her computer work and she shows me the ant colonies in her lab.

In the Herbarium long-time volunteer Donna Schenk relabels some of the folders that hold the plant specimens. Taxonomy is not static, molecular studies reveal new relationships and classifications are revised. To keep the collection up-to-date and to make it easy to find each specimen we need to keep up with these changes.

In the mollusc collection I find Collection Manager Caitlin Byrne working on the computer. Student worker Trevor Smoot sorts through a bag of mussel shells which a researcher donated to the collection. With a big smile Trevor lays out the shells on top of the cabinets, apparently these are some his favorite species. Others will be identified and catalogued later.

In the fish collection Sampling Coordinator Brian Zimmerman and Assistant Curator Marc Kibbey both work on their computers.

Zoology major Elijah Williams catalogs fish specimens from a recent acquisition:

About the Author: Angelika Nelson is curator of the Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics and the museum’s social media and outreach manager.

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