By Rachel Davis

I have been home from State College for a little more than a week. This past week has been more than enough time to reflect on the newly inserted piece in my career puzzle that was my experience at the Frost Entomological Museum. This summer I was exposed to a multitude of techniques and experiences in the entomological world and I would like to share my journey with the readers of this blog.

I arrived at the Frost a mere 9 days after graduating from the University of Minnesota. There was a post-grad feeling in the air and I was feeling good! I don’t think, however, anything could have prepared me for walking into the Frost and having my coworkers casually throw around, “hymenoptera”, “pterothorax”, or “maxilla” (except maybe an insect anatomy class). The feelings of uncertainty soon passed, and shortly after being put to work I began to feel like my small, research contributions were of importance to the progress of the Frost Museum.  Below I will briefly describe and reflect on the many projects I undertook while at the Frost. I will of course include pictures.

I began my summer with the task of completely digitizing specific damselfly species in our collection. By my estimation I believe I digitized over 1000 specimens. I learned about the legacy of the Beatty’s, their many expeditions, and how careful you must be when removing half-a-decade old damselflies from paper envelopes! I found great joy in going through the boxes of Odes and digitizing each specimen, one by one.

Each of these pictures of the specimens were then transcribed and georeferenced, a tedious process I detailed in a previous blog post. Despite the hurdles that I encountered while searching for the latitude and longitude of each collecting event, I believe that this was one of my favorite projects while at the Frost. I enjoyed both exploring the ranges of specific species and the challenge in finding an obscure, and improperly labeled pond. Challenges like this improved my diligence and heightened my incessant need for perfectionism to a degree never seen before! I even got to try my hand at creating niche models using ArcGIS and Maxent.

Although it may sound like I only stared at a computer or through a camera lens all summer, I am happy to report that Andy and the rest of the crew took the interns on multiple collecting trips. Exploring the fauna Ten Acre Pond had to offer, and simply getting out and experiencing the great outdoors with other bug enthusiasts was a delightful way to spend a few summer workdays. Helping Andy develop his Darwin Experiment for his future students was also rewarding. As I wrote about before in a previous blog post, sitting outside and intensely observing nature for 3 and a half hours was a true test of my patience and self-perceived intellectual limits.

My final projects were in an effort to improve the upkeep of Odonates in the collection. The collections that I helped maintain included both pinned dragonflies and damselflies, and Odes kept in ethanol. As some of you can probably guess, I have never worked in a museum and have no curation experience whatsoever. Everything is a new experience! I learned as I went along and was able to re-pin the entire Odonata collection into soft bottom trays. Some of the museum collection has not been catalogued yet, so digitizing and actually cataloguing what we have in our identified Odonata collections was a helpful contribution I made to the Frost. Just as well, shortly before leaving Penn State I helped develop the protocol for updating the Odonata ethanol collection. This part of the museum’s collection is especially in need of upkeep, so I began the time consuming process of changing out the ethanol and switching to new storage for our Ode friends in liquid.

 

I am immensely thankful for my time at the Frost. This experience in the museum is so vastly different than any of the past fieldwork-heavy internships I have had, and because of that I have grown as a scientist, not only in my skills but also philosophically.  At the beginning of my time at the Frost it seemed out of character for me to put so much effort in preserving a specimen. Why not dissect it? Can’t we do something more than look at it? If it will never be placed on display why do we strive to maintain the specimen in its original state? (I blame my background in parasitology and the biomedical sciences for these feelings!) Now, however, I think about curation and museums in a different light. Without trying to appear too sentimental, I see something beautiful now in the preservation of existence. To be able to look at and study something a researcher caught 50+ years ago provides the ability to study the past while in the present. Understanding the past is vital to anticipating the future, and as a scientist interested in the human-driven consequences for wildlife and the environment, I cherish this newfound perspective I have found at the Frost. Preservation is important.  And like the damselflies in the humidity-controlled cabinets, I hope my memories from this summer at the Frost are preserved well into the next half century. Thank you to everyone who made this internship possible for me. It has positively impacted me in ways I can’t yet even envision.

Finally, I must say Penn State Berkey Creamery ice cream is unparalleled. It made this experience that much sweeter.

Note: This has been posted by the lovely Isa Betancourt because Rachel is 39,000 feet in the air flying to Chile.

• Post Authored by Rachel Davis •