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Idusty room In central Florida, countless millipedes, centipedes, and other creepy crawlies sit and rot in specimen jars. These invertebrates are part of the Florida State Arthropod Collection in Gainesville, which contains more than 12 million specimens of insects and other arthropods, and expert curators have identified Florida’s native plants. and to identify pest species that threaten agricultural plants.
But not all specimens in the facility are treated equally, according to two people who have seen the collection firsthand. Non-insect samples such as shrimp and millipedes stored in ethanol are left to become irreparably damaged or completely lost, they say.
“This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” says former assistant curator Ann Dun about how FSCA is different from other collections she’s been involved with.
Experts say the loss of even unattractive specimens like centipedes is a setback for science. Of particular value are the holotypes, the specimen specimens that determine the description of the entire species. In fact, says Ainsley Seago, associate curator of invertebrate biology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, these specimens are so actively used in research that the diversity of holotypes in the collection outweighs their size. said to be often important.
a paper The paper, published in March 2023, emphasizes more generally the importance of museum specimens for addressing urgent challenges such as climate change and wildlife conservation, and is one of the world’s largest natural history museums. Of these, 73 have estimates of the total number of specimens. collection The number of specimens exceeds 1.1 billion. “This global collection provides a physical foundation for understanding the natural world and our place within it,” the authors write.
The museum, through Aaron Keller, director of public affairs for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which oversees the FSCA, declined to speak to Underak on the matter. In response to Dunn’s complaint filed with the FACS Inspector General, Director Trevor Smith, the museum’s parent agency, wrote: “Scientific specimens do not have to be pure or perfect specimens.” “Museum staff strives to preserve materials.” ”
Dan started working As assistant to curator Felipe Soto-Adames at the Florida State Arthropod Collection in April 2022. She was first hired to help maintain part of the FSCA collection, so-called wet specimens, invertebrates kept in alcohol-filled vials and jars. she told Underark in a recent interview. But she said she was shocked to see the condition of many of the specimens she was supposed to manage. (FSCA did not respond to requests for comment on Dunn’s employment or details of her role, and the museum did not respond to multiple requests for interviews with Soto-Adams.)
Dunn told Underk he found mushy specimens placed in brown ethanol, some with stoppers that had corroded so much that a waxy substance dripped into the contents of the vials. rice field. Most of the damage is in collections of non-insect arthropods such as argiope spiders, millipedes, and shrimps. She estimates that by 2022, half of her FSCA ethanol collection, which contains 200,000 vials and about 1.1 million individual arthropods, will be damaged or rotten. increase. Another person familiar with the FSCA collection agreed with Dunn’s assessment. (They requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.)
The FSCA was established in 1915 to house the collections of the Florida Plant Commission (now the Plant Industry Administration), and was formally taken over by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services before building on other state collections in the 1960s. was integrated with According to its website, FSCA currently aims to “build the world’s premier collection of terrestrial and aquatic arthropods to support the research, education, and functions of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.” It is said that there is
Dunn said the state of the collection prevented FSCA from fulfilling its mandate to identify the pest species. When people asked museums for help in identifying Shiba shrimp— Terrestrial crustaceans invading Florida — Dan had to turn to Google Images. “From her experience, she knew that the collection was utterly useless because of the lack of organization and deterioration of the specimens,” she said.
Maintaining such a large collection is not easy, especially for specimens preserved in alcohol. According to Shego of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, some institutions do manage their alcohol collections well, but many do not. (Shego is also president of the Entomological Collections Network, a nonprofit organization that provides best practices for collecting insects and other arthropods.) She described one such challenge in a Zoom interview. , held up a jar of dry crabs. All the alcohol inside had dissolved. Evaporated over time. Hard-bodied crabs can remain intact when desiccated, but soft-bodied invertebrates suffer even worse. Evaporation of alcohol can also degrade the stoppers used to seal specimen containers, especially if they are made of cork or rubber.
The Carnegie Museum of Natural History has about 76,000 containers of ethanol specimens, most of which are kept in the World War II-era Quonset Hut. This hut is made of corrugated steel and is not insulated. According to Seago, it takes a lot of effort to replenish the ethanol needed for each sample. Even if interns or volunteers can do all the testing, supervisors should oversee the process to make sure they use the correct alcohol concentration and understand how to organize specimens properly. .
“Even just keeping alcohol collection at the baseline ‘okay’ is a tremendous effort,” Shego said.
aAccording to Dan Her work at the Florida State Arthropod Collection was a one-year deal in April, days after she posted negative comments on her anonymous personal account about lead curator Paul Skelly’s behavior at work. was not updated and was discontinued. Dunn had filed a formal complaint with the FACS Inspector General’s Office on April 17 about the status of Skelly’s ethanol collection. The Inspector General determined that Dunn’s complaint did not merit an investigation and, in its written assessment, noted that Dunn: She was released on charges of “disrespectful conduct by a public official and disobedience following derogatory comments posted on social media.”
After being fired, Dunn tweeted a photo of a damaged specimen from the FSCA collection. Jackson Means, a millipede taxonomist at the Virginia Museum of Natural History, told Underk that he had only seen a similar situation in an alcohol collection that had sat in storage for 22 years. “These images are definitely long-term neglected,” he says.
Among the neglected specimens was a holotype, Dunn told Underark. Loss of the holotype can lead to: cause a ruckus But they could be replaced if someone made an effort to formally explain them. neotype (New holotypes replace lost or damaged holotypes). But neotype designations usually depend on holotypes and “the ability of others to determine whether specimens of the same species can be found from the same locality,” Shego said. For many species, there aren’t enough experts to do the research, and “the fewer taxonomists there are in the group, the less likely it is,” she said.
Seago is currently applying for a grant to support the discovery, integration and digitization of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History holotype specimens. And Means said the Virginia Museum of Natural History is also working to catalog the holotype. Before Dunn was fired, he worked on similar organizational efforts at FSCA.
M.Any collector From scientists to hobbyists, they donate their personal collections to museums. This was the case with Nell Cozy, who posthumously donated his millipede collection to his FSCA in 1979. He received his doctorate from Duke University in 1940 and was “the leading myriadologist of his time,” Means said. “She’s a really good collector and she explained a lot of the species.”
During Dunn’s efforts to help catalog the FSCA holotype, he found eight mislabeled cozy millipedes gathering dust on shelves in the wrong building. The sample was described in 2010 by William Shea, professor emeritus at the University of Hampden-Sydney, Virginia, who had borrowed the sample several years earlier for a research project. Neither Dan nor his project colleagues knew of its existence until Shear confirmed it. (Mr. Shear told Mr. Anderck that the disturbance was caused by a lack of communication from the previous curator, who has since borrowed the specimen without issue and deposited it with the FSCA.)
Dunn believes that the lifelong work of Cozy and other passionate collectors, such as arachnid expert Martin Muma, who died in 1989, can be difficult, especially in the absence of a dedicated taxonomist to care for them. Concerned about being at risk of degradation under FSCA. Means told Underk that it would be a shame to lose some of the work of a prominent collector. “Art historians may get angry, but it’s a lot like the deterioration of paintings,” he says. “You are losing a piece of history.”
Many curators at museums have preferences and prejudices about the particular groups they’re in charge of, especially in collections where “the people in charge just don’t care about those groups,” Shego said. If they belong to that group, they give priority to the care of that group. On the other hand, taxonomists may be difficult to obtain, and this is even more true for groups of small, obscure, uncharismatic creatures, she said. Dunn said this taxonomic bias is strong at FSCA, with a particular preference for beetles, she said. A person familiar with the museum’s collections, who requested anonymity, agreed with Dunn that the FSCA has a strong predilection for charismatic insects.
Museum donors also usually favor certain groups. Shego said it was easy to raise the money for a new butterfly cabinet. However, natural history museums need more funding to properly manage their entire collections. This is not always the case, even with the more popular creatures. “Funding is down across the board,” Means said. “That’s why we’ve lost staff.”
Dunn acknowledged that neglect in ethanol recovery was common, but said, “It’s just not acceptable.” And when it comes to holotypes, she says, there are no excuses. “Holotypes should never be treated carelessly.”
Means and Shego agreed. “The whole point of the museum is to keep the type specimen ‘forever’,” Means said.
Darren Incorvaia is a journalist who writes about animals and the natural world. His work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Scientific American, and Science His News. He has his Ph.D. He holds a PhD in ecology, evolution and behavior from Michigan State University.
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