[Nhcoll-l] the shipping of wee tiny microfossils

[Carrie A. Eaton]

Thank you, Doug! It's absolutely the SEM plugs that I'm imagining popping loose (while squealing "freedom!") in shipment. But I really like the idea of using a small piece of ethafoam or maybe even something like Teflon tape to get them to stick in their cases a bit better. Your 100 year old mosquito analogy gave me brow sweats just thinking about it - clearly we fossil folks are spoiled by durability. ;)
Cheers,
C

Carrie Eaton, Museum Curator
UW Geology Museum
1215 West Dayton Street
Madison, WI 53706
608.262.4912
twitter @uwgeologymuseum
facebook.com/uwgeologymuseum

From: Nhcoll-l [mailto:nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Doug Yanega
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2018 11:51 AM
To: nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] the shipping of wee tiny microfossils

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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