Like most museums, there is no shortage of curation projects at the Frost. I’ve described some of the larger ones on our list—rehouse the Beatty Odonata collection, rebuild the teaching collection, renovate the public space—but today was partially dedicated to saving some Korean insects I found in an old box.
The collecting event labels point to various cave sites in Korea (see PDF of the Korean cave sites at ScholarSphere), where someone collected these insects in the 1960s. Most of them are camel crickets (Orthoptera: Rhaphidophoridae), but many are flies (Diptera) and a few are diplurans (Diplura: Campodeidae and Japygidae). The latter is what grabbed my attention, as not only do we have a relatively small dipluran collection at the Frost, but these specimens were also quite large for Diplura. I think these specimens have been sitting in the same liquid for 50+ years, and judging by its color and the level of preservative it’s time to rehouse them.
It’s also an opportunity to dream about digitization protocols for fluid-preserved specimens. This is just a quick attempt at a mock-up, but perhaps we will end up imaging all of our vials like this:
It took very little time to set up and was ultra low tech. One can also clearly read the labels and identifier and get the gist of the specimen(s). Others have found ways to industrialize the wet specimen digitization process, of course, or at least produce much higher quality images. See the presentations at iDigBio’s Fluid-preserved Invertebrate Wiki, for starters. We’ll have to find the right balance between efficiency and quality for our material, as well as a workflow that incorporates a storage upgrade. Most of our vials and jars need to be replaced or at least have their caps replaced.
Another issue regarding old preservative was raised by one of my colleagues: Just what’s in that stuff?
Some of these old jars, with especially rotten specimens in them, smell highly phenolic—repulsive enough to make at least one of us wonder whether extraordinary measures should be taken when handling the material. (Of course we wear gloves and other personal protective equipment when we handle fluid-preserved specimens, and we dispose of all liquids through Penn State’s Environmental Health and Safety system.) I’d love to know what really comprises the variously yellowish, orangish, brownish, and even blackish (especially for old, large millipedes!) liquids we find in these old containers. My quick sifting of the literature yielded many articles about fluid-preserved collections, but all of them limited their chemical analysis to percent ethanol, percent formalin, and/or pH. And the context of each article was specimen health, rather than curator health. Anyway, this question sits on our shelf as a potentially useful and enlightening undergraduate project. Anyone interested?
Back to the Korean caves. It looks like most of these insects came from karst caves in central Korea (ROK), though a few are from “lava caves”. Most of these are closed to the public, and insects collected there in the mid-1960s are definitely worth preserving.
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