label data

Madtoms of the OSUM Fish Division

February 5 2016February 4, 2016

Why are the ‘toms mad? Might have to do with the fact that madtoms are so small and have a hard time competing with their larger con-familials (like Bullhead Catfish and Channel Catfish) for space and food. But connate with several other small animal species they make up for their small size with a nastily painful poison sting. Ask any catfish aficionado, or even a neophyte; and they will tell you that they pay careful attention to the sharp spines the catfishes carry at the front of their dorsal and pectoral fins. Whereas catfishes of the North American Ictaluridae genera other than Noturus lack the actual venom, those other genera do carry bacteria on their spines that can cause infection in the wound. The madtoms secrete their venom in a sac at the base of their pectoral spine. When threatened the madtoms lock their pectoral spine in an erect position, causing the sac to rupture and releasing the toxin into the water.

Another character that typifies smaller animals is their habit of remaining in the shadows. Madtom species are quite furtive, hiding under rocks and logs or in crevices including crayfish burrows. Like other catfish genera they tend to be most active at night. A savvy madtom collector sallies forth in the darkness with a lantern that attracts the bewhiskered nocturnals like moths to a flame. The best time for collecting many madtom species is in the cooler months of Autumn, up through December, when they congregate en-masse out in the open. Madtoms spawn in late spring through summer, so could it be they carry out this excursion in the colder season for the simple reason that many larger predators have moved downstream to deeper waters?

This highly cryptic group of catfishes contains several species with populations that are imperiled to varying degrees. Some, like Ohio’s Scioto Madtom, are Extinct while many are Endangered, Threatened or Of Special Concern at the State to Federal level. Noturus species occupy a wide array of habitats but all rely on aquatic insects for their food. Images of a few of the madtom species vouchered in the OSUM Fish Division are posted below.

OSUM 35531 Noturus flavipinnis Yellowfin Madtom. Several populations of this species are imperiled or extirpated. Listed as Federally Threatened. They were successfully reintroduced by Conservation Fisheries International in Tennessee.

OSUM 61379 Noturus munitus Frecklebelly Madtom. Uncommon, declining in some areas of five small, disjunct populations in Gulf Coast drainages.

OSUM 103721 Noturus flavus The Stonecat Madtom is one of the most abundant, as well as the largest madtom species in Ohio with populations across the Mississippi River and Great Lakes drainages in the U.S. and lower Canada, frequently found in faster flowing riffles but also in lakes where there is at least a moderate current.

Noturus flavus Stonecat Madtom, photo by Uland Thomas.

OSUM 50143 Noturus insignis Margined Madtom. Another widespread species with strong populations throughout the Atlantic Slope drainages in northeastern U.S.

Noturus insignis Margined Madtom from Blackwater River Virginia, photo by Brian Zimmerman.

Noturus eleutherus Mountain Madtom, photo by Uland Thomas. Common in some areas but one of Ohio’s State Endangered madtom species.

OSUM 86131 Noturus miurus Brindled Madtom. Relatively common as madtoms go, prefers better oxygenated waters in streams with gravel or sand, likes to hide in leaves and sticks, also inhabits rocky lakeshores.

Noturus miurus Brindled Madtom about to be released/reintroduced from my hand after a trip to Leading Creek in a cooler.

Noturus gyrinus Tadpole Madtom, photo by Brian Zimmerman. The Tadpole Madtom occupies quieter waters with sticks and other woody debris, and tolerates muddy, silty areas better than most other madtoms.

Noturus elegans Elegant Madtom, from Russel Creek Kentucky. Photo by Ben Arthur. Locally common albeit only found in the Green River drainage of Kentucky. Note the sharp barbs on the rear of the pectoral fin spine that make it particularly hard to remove catfishes from a net!

About the Author: Marc Kibbey is Assistant Curator of the OSU Fish Division at the Museum of Biological Diversity.

Digitizing your Mussels

November 23 2015November 22, 2015

Museum accessibility has proceeded by leaps and bounds in a relatively short span of time. When I was working on chitons for my Masters Thesis I routinely made the pilgrimage to the National Museum, the Academy of Natural Sciences, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and many others to examine material. Outside of the occasional loan or (God forbid!) an actual letter, there was no other way to get information out of a collection. This quickly changed with the advent of the world-wide web. Coupled with electronic databases, it was now possible for scientists to view catalog data without ever leaving the office. While in some ways this is unfortunate (every systematist should at some point visit these historical collections), the result was millions of records available at the touch of a keyboard. The OSU Division of Molluscs joined this effort early on by placing their freshwater mussel collection catalog online. The freshwater gastropod collection will be next to be uploaded for an estimated total approaching 2 million specimens – the largest freshwater mollusc collection in the world.

But still, these are only records. How do you know the specimen behind the record is correctly identified? What color is it? In what condition is the specimen? Is there some unusual feature that might be of interest? Enter the next phase – the creation and uploading of digital images of the specimens, and associated labels. With the image(s) available online, now a worker can see nearly everything he/she would ever want to know about the specimen – again without ever leaving the office. Sounds great. But to the people who actually curate the collections this is a quantum leap in effort. Specimens must be retrieved, set up for imaging, photographed, incorporated into the database, and uploaded.

The freshwater bivalve collection is in this laborious phase of producing digital images of specimens. With over 90,000 lots to image, this will not be a quick project. To speed up the effort we image not individual specimens, but individual lots. Scale bars are included in the photo to indicate approximate size. Labels are also imaged. These are incorporated into the catalog database so that all information may be viewed online – collection record, locality map, lot image, and label image. In our version, a button on the catalog screen will take the viewer to the images. The upload of this digitized catalog is some ways off, but stay tuned.

Proposed catalog with link to images

Digitized specimens and label

About the Author: Dr. G. Thomas Watters is Curator of Molluscs at the Museum of Biological Diversity.

Collecting the small plants

November 6 2015November 6, 2015

When told that a herbarium is a collection of plants, most people think of flowering plants or pine trees, or perhaps even ferns. The herbarium possesses these plants, but it also has other plants – an often, overlooked group of plants, the bryophytes that include mosses, liverworts and hornworts.

An example of a bryophyte, the ribbed bog moss, Aulacomnium palustre, with stalks of propagules that will be dispersed for asexual reproduction. From a wet meadow at Waldo, Marion County, Ohio. April 21, 2006. Photo by Bob Klips.

Bryophytes are small. As a result, the characters that distinguish bryophytes are small, microscopically so, but the array of beauty and intricacy displayed in flowering plants also are present in bryophytes. Those researchers that study bryophytes, bryologists, are privileged to observe this vibrant world of miniature plants.

An example of the complexity and elegance of the spore-producing structures of the small-mouthed thread moss, Bryum lisae var. cuspidatum, as observed by a bryologist. Alum Creek State Park, Waldo, Marion County. April 17, 2008. Photo by Bob Klips.

Bryophytes are small plants and often require the use of dissecting and compound microscopes to view diagnostic characters. Here bryologist Diane Lucas uses the compound microscope to view the shape and size of the leaf cells of a moss.

A leaf of the moss, Bryum flaccidum, showing hexagonal leaf cells. Moss and liverwort leaves are only one cell layer thick, thus each individual leaf cell is easily visible, as seen here viewed with the compound microscope. The shape and size of the leaf cells are often used to distinguish moss species.

Bryophytes often grow in places where other plants cannot grow, such as on the sides of trees or on the surface of boulders. Bryophytes are able to grow on such substrates because they are able to survive after drying to conditions equal to the water content of the surrounding environment, conditions that would cause wilting and death in other plants. Poikilohydry, this ability to dry and then re-establish growth in the presence of moisture, is a character that flowering plants have evolutionarily lost. In herbaria, the poikilohydric nature of bryophytes has been observed in some specimens that are able to grow after five, ten or twenty years dried in a herbarium.

A typical habitat of the rounded tongue moss, Anomodon minor, on limestone rock. From Duranceaux Park, Delaware County, Ohio. April 24, 2011. Photo by Bob Klips.

Bryophyte specimens are easier to collect and to preserve compared to other plants because they do not require pressing, or mounting onto herbarium sheets. While in the field, bryophyte plants are assigned a collection number and placed into small paper bags or paper envelopes, where they are dried. In the herbarium, bryophytes are stored in envelope packets that are made from 100% cotton rag archival paper. Labels with species identification, collection location, habitat information, collection date and collector are printed onto the face of the envelope. The envelopes are stored in flat boxes specially designed to fit on the shelves of herbarium cabinets.

Bryophytes are collected in the field in paper bags or envelopes. The bag in the photo has a collection number at the top, followed by a tentative field identification and the substrate on which the moss (shown on top of bag) was collected.

Typical information on face of a bryophyte packet, in this case, a packet of a moss from Crawford County, Ohio.

An open packet showing moss plants stored inside.

Flat boxes store bryophyte packets inside herbarium cases.

A herbarium case with two rows of boxes that contain packets of bryophyte specimens.

The Ohio State University Herbarium contains over 10,000 specimens of bryophytes – a bryologist’s delight.

From a bryologist’s point of view – delighting in the world of small plants: the moss, Fissidens subbasilaris, with stalks subtended by oblong sporangia that contain spores. From Christmas Rocks State Nature Preserve, Fairfield County, Ohio. September 7, 2014. Photo by Bob Klips.

About the Author: Dr. Cynthia Dassler is Curator of Cryptogams (small plants that produce spores) at The Ohio State Herbarium (OS) in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology.

Hawai’ian Tree Snails – an old and unlikely Ohio connection

October 9 2015October 7, 2015

Hawai’i is (or was) home to a great diversity of tree snails in the families Achatinellidae and Amastridae. It seemed as if every valley on every island had its own suite of species. Many were quite common. But that was then. Now they have been decimated by the introduction, accidental or otherwise, of invasive hogs and other animals brought by European settlers. Some species, even an entire genus, have become extinct.

Wesley Newcomb

Wesley Newcomb (1808-1892) was a physician, social activist, and conchologist. Born in New York, he moved from Albany to California in 1849, then to Hawai’i in 1850 due, in part, to his wife’s ill health. There he practiced medicine, served on the Board of Health, became active in the Hawaiian Temperance Movement, and collected a lot of shells. In 1855 he returned to Albany. His collection was purchased by Ezra Cornell, founder of Cornell University, for $15,000, and it resides there still. An avid shell collector, Newcomb traveled to Europe, the West Indies, and Central and South America. He described over 100 species, including many Hawai’ian Achatinellidae and Amastridae.

The Division of Molluscs has a modest collection of Hawai’ian Achatinellidae and Amastridae originating from Newcomb. The collection was either purchased by or traded with Henry Moores in the mid-1800’s. (Henry Moores, 1812-1896, assembled one of the most diverse shell collections of his time. The Ohio State University purchased this collection, 3,500 specimens for $1,750, about 1890). Card stock used for labels cut from postcards date from the 1850s. The collection has an accompanying list of specimens, some notes, and a short letter to Moores. The curious, printed handwriting matches that of Newcomb’s labels now at the Paleontological Research Institute at Ithaca, New York, and there is no doubt that they are Newcomb’s specimens. Specimens have as many as six labels, with different numbers, in the same vials. However, according to Newcomb’s accompanying list, he inserted “card” labels with a number that matched the number on the list. These card labels, often small squares, have numbers written by Newcomb’s hand and can easily be discerned from the later labels added to the specimens. Some specimens are numbered in ink or pencil, but these numbers were added by Moores. The specimens were apparently sent to Moores after Newcomb’s return to the mainland.

Portion of letter to Moores

Some aspects of the collection are interesting from a personal view of Newcomb. Many of the specimens were dirty and bear on the small card labels the advice “wash them” (we have carefully done so in a sonic cleaner). The list arrived before the shells as Newcomb tells Moores to “Wait for the Waggon! (Express)” And one label bears the opinionated observation: “‘guernea‘ W.H.P. [crossed out, then added:] A. perversa? Swains. ‘guernea‘ of some fool.” Newcomb’s “fool” was apparently contemporary fellow Hawai’ian conchologist, William Harper Pease.

Below are some of Newcomb’s own specimens now in the Division of Molluscs.

About the Author: Dr. G. Thomas Watters is the Curator of Molluscs.

The case(s) of the missing collection data

September 11 2015September 11, 2015

Previous blog posts have mentioned the value of data on collection dates, geographic localities, hosts (where relevant) and even things like the weather at the time of collection (collecting before or after a rain storm in the desert gives rather different results). For mites, the group I work on, we often want even more detail. Mites can be both very broad in their requirements and very picky. So information on microhabitat can be crucial. For example, in parasitic mites, we would like things like site on a host. If a mite was found in the quill of the secondary wing feathers of a house sparrow, I can probably give a pretty good guess on what it is. Not certain, there are always surprises, but I can make a good first guess. We know this by experience and by examining records in collections that have that level of precision.

In short, life is good as long as there are data, but what if you end up with specimens with little or no interpretable data? In the Acarology collection specimens are usually on microscope slides or in vials with alcohol.

Good slides with poor data

Many older slides or vials have labels giving only a partial identification plus a number or code, presumably referring to a notebook, letter, or other non-specified source. In principle fine, but without follow-up those notes get lost, misplaced, etc., and that means trouble. In one unfortunate case, roughly 3,000 chigger slides from South Korea, the data were deliberately omitted from slides and vials. These specimens were collected at the end of the Korean war, and it was probably not a good idea to specifically tell everybody where each military base was located. The chiggers were collected at that time and that place to help manage scrub typhus, a disease transmitted by chiggers. Good idea at that time, but it makes recovering the data at this time, sixty years after the armistice, quite tricky.

A chigger in all its glory

Anyway, so what do you do when you have a bunch of microscope slides or vials with interesting specimens but no, or very little, data? That is where curation becomes a bit of detective work. There are some options.

Before and after microscope labels

1) If the specimens have at least a code/number, you often can find the same code of the same code format somewhere else in the collection. This is a brute-force method that requires databasing of large numbers of specimens. Luckily, the vast majority of the OSU Acarology Collection is now databased, with most label data captured. Find matching codes, hope that at least one slide has complete information, and if so, you are set for the other slides in the group. Even if the match is not perfect, a similar style of codes may help narrow down where poorly labeled specimens came from. For example, a certain style of code was used for specimens recovered from bats in Costa Rica. Starting with near complete data on 2-3 labels (out of ~400) and using an on-line mammal collection database (VertNet) we recovered all the relevant collection data and even know where the host specimens are located (Los Angeles County Museum in this case).

Page from Lipovsky chigger notebook

2) Miscellaneous field note books, notes, etc. People have asked me why we keep file cabinets worth of old notebooks, notes, and letters from folks that left long ago. Barring proper log books, this may be where the data we want to recover comes from. One good notebook can solve problems with many specimens. Data for many of the Korean chiggers came from a notebook at the bottom of a drawer of largely useless paperwork. Of course it would be nice to have it all digitized, but we do not have the time, people or resources to do that at this time.

3) Sometimes it just takes some luck. For a long time I was going nowhere with a small set of slides with only identifications, and, on one slide, a name that seemed to refer to a locality in India, and something about a dung beetle. Then one day, out of the blue, I got an e-mail from somebody wondering whether I was interested in the remainder of a collection of mites he made from beetles in India. He had already sent me some specimens years ago (my mystery slides) and now I could add some real data. It does not happen very often, but it counts.

As a final note, some of you might think that the above does include quite a lot of interpretation. How accurate are these interpretations? This is a real problem. We try to be conservative in the “guesses” we make, but may fail on occasion. This is why we copy all original label data verbatim and make that available with each specimen. And we have had a few occasions where folks told us our interpretation was wrong. A big thank you to those folks!

About the Author: Dr. Hans Klompen is Professor in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology & Director of the Ohio State University Acarology Collection. Silhouette of Sherlock Holmes: The Sherlock Holmes Museum. CC Attribution License. http://www.sherlock-holmes.co.uk. All other images courtesy of the author.

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

August 28 2015October 7, 2015

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.

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.
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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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