[Nhcoll-l] the shipping of wee tiny microfossils

[Doug Yanega]

On 7/27/18 8:50 AM, Carrie A. Eaton wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Does anyone have a good protocol or a standard policy (part of your 
> CMP) regarding the shipping of very tiny microfossil mounts? Think 
> small things mounted to SEM plugs, conodont slides, little bits that 
> could decide to make a break for it while being shipped via FedEx, 
> etc. Feel free to email me off list – I’m all ears for suggestions, 
> standard policies/stances on this, etc.
>
>
Entomological specimens are - arguably, at least - among the most 
fragile objects one can ship, and we do it all the time. Think about 
shipping a 100-year old mosquito back and forth in the mail without 
losing any legs. It mostly comes down to shock absorption. A box with 
pinned specimens will normally have about 6 inches of packing material 
on all sides, like packing peanuts and/or bubble wrap. We use enormous 
outer boxes, but they weigh next to nothing. The inner packaging details 
are dependent upon the weight of the specimens; a box of mosquitoes is 
just specimens on pins, but a box of grasshoppers or scarab beetles will 
involve using numerous extra pins to "brace" each specimen from rotating 
or having their pins pop out of the foam substrate. One loose specimen 
becomes a miniature wrecking ball, so there needs to be *no possibility 
of anything moving around freely*. A really secure box won't even have 
more than a few mm of clearance between the heads of the pins and the 
inner closure, to prevent pins coming out of the substrate. Parts or 
whole specimens are often mounted in small glass vials, or on microscope 
slides, and the same basic rules apply; each vial or slide is in its own 
compartment in an inner package, with a lot of outer packing material.

For SEM stubs, if you can't contain each stub separately (which is what 
I'd be tempted to do, myself), then you'd need some way to prevent the 
stubs from popping free; from what I recall of the plastic holders for 
SEM stubs, there's a significant gap between the stubs and the lid, and 
you'd need to put something resilient into that gap, like a small piece 
of thin bubble wrap, to restrain the stubs. It may not be so much a 
matter of established protocol, but improvisation.

Hope this helps,

-- 
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
              http://cache.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82

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