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.
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- The imposing dome of the Iziko Museums, Cape Town, South Africa, against the backdrop of Table Mountain.
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- The charming K.W. Neatby Building location of the Canadian National Insect Collection, Ottawa, and our home away from home.
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- Wasps specialists hanging out at the entrance of the research collections, Hungarian Natural History Museum, Budapest. (L-R: Masner, Popovici, Mikó, Johnson.)
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- Door to the research collections of the Royal Museum of Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium. Very inconspicuous.
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!
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- At the Entomology Collection of the Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawai’i, the dry insect specimens are kept in very tall compactors. To reach the top drawers we had to use a ladder.
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- Beautiful wooden cabinets house the dry insect specimens at Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Brussels.
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- The vast holdings of the Australian National Insect Collection (Canberra) are kept in metal cabinets and (heavy) metal drawers. No need to exercise after a day examining specimens in the collection.
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- Extensive wet collection at the Iziko Museums, Cape Town, South Africa. We spent two weeks going over every sample in that collection.
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.
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- We have a portable microphotography set up that we carry with us when we visit collections. Dr. Norman Johnson imaging specimens at the Canadian National Insect Collection.
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- Dr. Norman Johnson databasing specimen label data at the Natural History Museum, London. We carried that little laptop computer to many research visits to collections in the USA and abroad.
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- Our long-time collaborator and travel companion, Dr. Lubomir Masner, sorting parasitoid wasps to genus level at the Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute, Taichung City. He and Norman sorted more than 30,000 specimens of the genus Telenomus alone!
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- Dr. Norman Johnson examining specimens under a microscope at the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
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!
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- We happened to be visiting the museum in Brussels on the weekend of ‘Brussels in Bloom’, a fantastic festival we knew nothing about until then. Every year there’s a new design for the carpet made of fresh flowers!
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- Sunset in Honolulu was a delightful treat after many long hours examining specimens at the Entomology collection of the Bishop Museum.
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- Local news in Pretoria, South Africa, at the time of our visit to the Plant Protection Research Institute, reported on a large crocodile found in the city. Sobering!
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- Sue, the resident Tyrannosaurus rex at the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, all by herself early one morning.
About the Author: Dr. Luciana Musetti is an entomologist and Curator of the C. A. Triplehorn Insect Collection.