Entomological Museums: Little progress in 60 years.

At the 1949 meeting of the Pacific Coast Entomological Society, retiring president Edward S. Ross gave an address on the role of entomological museums. He outlined six major functions which can be applied to natural history collections in general.

1. To preserve specimens: "In thus preserving and making available for use the specimens upon which the literature is is based the museum performs one of its most important functions; namely, that of being a place where collections can be received curated, and preserved for future reference."

2. To serve as gathering point for newly collected and unstudied specimens: "When a museum fails to gather new material it is as dead and as unproductive as a machine without fuel."

3. To provide facilities and loan material for specialists:

All museums, of course, attempt to have table space and equipment for visiting scientists...Obviously, however, it is impossible for a specialist personally to visit each museum in the course of a given taxonomic project...Curators, because of pressure of other work, or a fewar of losing specimens, unfortunately are not always eager to fill loan requests. They should realize, however, that it is one of their primary duties to honor any loan request made by a worker in good standing, or who is properly recommended. Unstudied specimens lying idle in museums at a time when revisionary work is being done might just as well be back in the field if they are not utilized during such fleeting periods of activity.

4. To specialize (to some extent) in a particular group or region: "The resultant development of outstanding collections in a taxonomic group is a desirable and an essential step towards making real published conclusions."

5. To provide representative sets of specimens for major groups around the world: "In many orders higher categories have been very incompletely correlated from a world standpoint. There is a need for first hand examination, not a mere literature knowledge, of the type species upon which these categories are based."

6. To educate the public: "Very often [the museum] is the only place where youth, the post-university-age amateur, and the professional entomologist can find the means for pursuing his work...Avocational entomology can add to the fullness of many a life and this fact alone could well justify the place of museums in our society."


The major problem with meeting these functions, he said, "is financial support of the activity is more in proportion to the size of the organisms, than to the size of the job." Charismatic megafauna such as birds and mammals often receive greater funding, despite smaller amounts of taxonomic work needed in those groups. And in the eyes of the public, these tasks lack the shiny, new appeal of other sciences based in high technology. Shortages in staffing, space and organizing materials are due to museum work being "like that of a library...very unspectacular."

To Dr. Ross, the single most important progressive change needed was freer loaning of type specimens between institutions, with a central filing system containing information on the types for all names of insects worldwide. The most controversial aspect of his proposal was a central type depository, perhaps at the Smithsonian, where all holotype specimens collected in the United States would be located.

I am sure the immediate reaction of many curators to this proposal will be one of horror, but most of this horror I believe would be based on unscientific selfish reasons. it is not the purpose of types to make an institutional or private collection valuable or indispensable. Admittedly it would mean that some museums would give up more than others. As matters stand, however, no institution is self-sufficient in regard to types and all stand to gain in the long run. What is really important is that our ponderous science would advance more rapidly with unwavering, steady steps. [emphasis his]

It is clear after 60 years that this dream is far from being realized. The problems of staff and funding shortages are the same today as they were then, if not worse. And central type depositories aside, there is still no central database of names and types for insects. This is in spite of the ubiquity of Internet, and many independent attempts by taxonomists in their groups of specialization. Many museums are digitizing their collections, but these catalogs are institutional and seldom connected to each other. Despite technological progress, natural history collections have a long way to go before name and type information is completely available. The problems of today are the same as then.

Thanks to Doug Yanega of the Entomological Collections Network listserv for the tip-up to this article.

Reference:
Ross, E. 1950. The Role of the Entomological Museum. Pan-Pacific Entomologist 26: 1-10.

Misconceptions about taxonomy.

I know Gawker is supposed to be a snarky internet publication concerned more with the hipness of it's readers than relaying actual pieces of news, and vertebrate paleontology stories aren't exactly the general subject matter of this blog. But this article by Max Read on a new species of cerotopsid discovered in the basement of the British Museum which calls paleontologists "morons" is pure idiocy, and is a clear example of the public misunderstanding of how new species are discovered.

As I noted recently, natural history collections are repositories for specimens that grow in value over time from information added to these acquisitions by researchers. The true value of any individual specimen is often not revealed until years after it's acquisition. As curators and visiting scientists use the specimen for their research, include it in publications, and use that information to educate the public, the specimen increases in value. Even broken and fragmentary items like the fossil in question are not tossed out, and over time many of these items will end up in "cigar box limbo". What the former curator thought was a few rubbish pieces of a previously described cerotopsid dinosaur was nevertheless saved, and a century later found to represent a new, seemingly intermediate group between the well known Centrosaurus and Styracosaurus.

That this is a common occurrence would no doubt come as a surprise to Mr. Read. Many of the new species described every year are already sitting in the shelves of natural history collections around the world, sometimes for hundreds of years. These specimens are unidentified, or incorrectly identified, or identified as another closely related species. Figuring out which of these are new species is the job of an expert in that group who has the experience to tease out these minor differences and understand their taxonomic meaning. And it may not be until a hundred years after the acquisition till a taxonomist of that caliber comes along. The length of time between taxonomic revisions of a particular group is painfully long, and the number of available experts is spread thin across all the work that needs doing. This problem is called the Taxonomic Impediment, and as curatorial positions are retired and unfilled, the number of groups without experts only increases. What seems moronic to Mr. Read is actually an issue of funding for basic taxonomy, and not a lack of intelligence on the part of the British Museum's curators.

In addition, I don't think the general public understands just how much research goes into describing a new species. First, the researcher in question has to have some sort of expertise in the group so they can actually see that differences that would tip off an undescribed species. This requires years of careful observation; it's not something which can be taught in a classroom. Then the expert often has to examine the type specimens, which usually means travel to at least one distant museum. Finally, after all these tedious comparisons, the taxonomist has to publish the discovery, which requires illustrations, summaries of all the material examined, intense editing, and wrestling with reviewer comments.

The portrayal of the alpha taxonomist as a jungle explorer in pith helmet reaching down to pick up a flower or beetle, hoisting it high and dubbing it "Excaliber arthurius" on the spot is not only wrong, it misrepresents the true difficulty of our science. It makes people think that, well, paleontologists who find new species in their museum basement are morons. Or that throwing money at tropical expeditions is going to somehow, in itself, describe all species on the planet. Or that museums are defunct, musty, and mostly useless artifacts of the past. The truth is that taxonomists are underfunded, understaffed, and being shoved out of the picture by these misconceptions.

Surprise, you have acquisitions!: Specimens in cigar box limbo.

While working and volunteering in the Clemson University Arthropod Collection (CUAC) during my master's program, I stumbled across many surprising (sometimes alarming) finds lost to decades in dark corners and cabinets. These included items such as:

• Holotype specimens from a museum that no longer exists (found while cleaning my office out in the first week)
• 30 year old loans
  
• Boxes full of vials with code labeled specimens linked to notebooks, left by a former graduate student
• Drawers of damaged (yet mostly salvageable) tropical insects for display
• A folder containing 40 years of notes and other items of the great late entomologist Herbert H. Ross (more on that in a later post)

These things just happen in a collection too large for its space, with too little staff for it's size (and this is true at even the biggest museums now). Things are left there, loaned and shelved, acquired and forgotten. Some curators are proactive, but when the collection manager, who is responsible for the day to day care of the collection, leaves or changes some things will inevitably become purposeless and other things stacked on top. And the CUAC is not a large collection by any means, only about 1 million specimens housed in 2 rooms too small for the collection. If the above was found in such a small collection rebuilt after a fire in 1925, you can imagine the large amount of surprise "acquisitions" associated with larger or older institutions.

Cigar boxes full of papered specimens from SDNHM (© Nelvin C. Cepeda)

The San Diego Natural History Museum (SDNHM) has a collection comparable in size to the CUAC, but is about 75 years older. You would expect a collection of this size and age, including it's past space problems, to have specimens in limbo, and this is exactly the case. Twenty thousand insects papered in 75 cigar boxes is a huge project, which is probably why a portion has been put off for over 100 years. The insects not only have to be identified, but mounted, labeled, repaired, and placed in the greater collection; in other words, they need to be fully curated. The project received a 275 thousand dollar grant to do this and more, which is reasonable. It means that, factoring out other costs, the museum can afford to pay several people for several years to make things happen, depending on whether they use sla-, I mean, grad student workers or full professionals (the former will work for less).

Some of the commenters on the article question the use of grant money to complete this project, but I don't think they understand the scale and scope of "specimen limbo" projects. Assuming the people working on these are doing this full time, I'm not even sure the project can get done in a couple years. Every specimen will require individual care, and while the mounting, identification, and labeling may take only an hour per specimen, the relaxing time is hours to days, and only so many specimens can be relaxed at once. We're talking maybe several hours work for 20,000 specimens, which is at least 500 weeks or over nine and a half years of work for a single person. Assuming, of course, that they are working full time on this project, 40 hours a week, year round. This is a massive task, and like I said, every collection has at least one of these specimen limbo projects. There is no quick fix, only long tedious work.


ETA: It really burns me when people question funding to already underfunded, understaffed natural history collections. So I left a longer, more ranty, uh, rant over at the article. Since it is more ranty and less coherent I'll let it stay there.