Butterfly specimens from the 1880’s that have been just mounted and still need to be sorted
The first curator of the Triplehorn Insect Collection at Ohio State, Josef Knull, was appointed in 1934, over 82 years ago. The core of the collection at that time was mostly the working collections from faculty and students, and the large Wenzel Beetle Collection that was acquired in 1925.
Now, Joe Knull was a ‘beetle guy,’ specialized in wood-boring beetles. He collected all insects, including butterflies and moths, but his main efforts were concentrated on the Coleoptera. Joe’s wife, Dorothy, had a PhD in Entomology from Ohio State. Her interest was the leafhoppers. She studied under the supervision of Herbert Osborn and collaborated with Dwight DeLong. Together these three specialists left us a massive collection of leafhopper types that is second only to that at the U.S. National Museum in Washington, DC.
By the time Joe Knull retired the collection had grown to number over 1.5 million specimens, most of them collected and preserved by Joe and Dorothy (as a volunteer) in their 28 ½ years of service. After Knull came Charles Triplehorn, another ‘beetle guy’. He was curator for 30 years and had many students. No wonder we have such a significant beetle collection!
The OSU collection kept growing. We became one of the largest university insect collections in the country, an active research and education facility focused on insect taxonomy and systematics, and a valued resource to scientists in the USA and abroad. But we have never been known for our Lepidoptera collection. It’s just how the chips have fallen. The insect groups that were actively being studied by faculty or students, especially beetles and leafhoppers, grew faster, became well-known, were borrowed and studied by more scientists. To be fair, three significant Lepidoptera collections were added to our holdings over the years: the Tallant, the Leussler, and the Homer Price collections. But still we did not become known by our Lepidoptera collection … until recently.
Since 2011, we have received various small to medium size moth and butterfly donations, some quite important, like the Asher E. Treat Moth Voucher collection. In 2015 we received the massive Parshall Butterfly Collection (see my blog posts here and here), with over 50,000 mounted specimens. As a result of these donations, we currently have many cabinets marked ‘Miscellaneous Unsorted Lepidoptera’ that have yet to be separated to family, genus and species. Unfortunately, we lack the expertise and the money to do that ourselves.
And there, my friends, lies my problem and the reason why I’m writing this. Our goal is to digitize the specimen data for all our butterflies and moths so the information is available online to anyone interested in Lepidoptera. But before we can do that, we need help to tackle the curation and identification of our Lepidoptera collection.
I am reaching out to the members of the Ohio Lepidopterists Society, a group that uses and understands the value of insect collections, in the hope that some of you will be interested in helping us achieve our goals.
Lepidopterists can help the OSU insect collection by providing identifications for some of our many unsorted butterflies and moths. Or by simply helping us reorganize them. There is a lot of manual labor that goes into the curation of a collection: moving specimens (sometimes repairing them), labeling unit trays, drawers and cabinets, and organization. And the final stage of publishing all the data on the Internet also takes labor in transcribing specimen labels, putting latitude and longitude values on collecting localities, and uploading to the database. There aren’t enough hours in a day that would allow me, personally, to do everything. But volunteers can have a tremendously positive impact, especially experienced volunteers.
Collections document the biodiversity that makes the world such an interesting place, and in the long run help us to understand nature and to make wise, evidence-based decisions on conservation and enhancement. Please contact us if you are interested in donating some of your time, energy, and knowledge to help improve our Lepidoptera collection.
If you’re unable to make a gift of your time, you can also do the next best thing: please consider a monetary gift to our Friends Fund. The money goes directly to the collection for the support of student workers and for the purchase of specimen trays, drawers, pins, etc.
Thank you!
This article was first published in the December 2016 issue of the Ohio Lepidopterists Newsletter as “A new beginning for Lepidoptera at the Ohio State Insect Collection.” Posted here with minor editing.
About the Author: Luciana Musetti is an Entomologist who studies parasitoid wasps & and the current Curator of the Triplehorn Insect Collection.