[Nhcoll-l] the shipping of wee tiny microfossils

Fri Jul 27 14:31:39 EDT 2018

Hi Carrie,

I shipped SEM stubs to Italy and they arrived fine. There are a couple of
things you can do to make sure things are safe:

- use better stub boxes. If your stubs come off easily, then look for
better boxes in which they're more snug (we had to do this). You can also
get individual stub holders.
- if you don't have dissociation issues (meaning the box says outside what
it contains), you can remove some stubs and ship each box with less stubs
in it, and carve ethafoam circles out, so each stub is further contained.
This is harder to do when all the stubs are there because carving the
ethafoam can be too hard
- do not put anything on top of the stubs, because the material may rub
against them and detach the fossil/sample from the stub. If you're worried
about detachment, the ethafoam carvings are a good idea, because they
should be as tall as the lid, and prevent anything from getting mixed with
the rest (this doesn't prevent detachment, but dissociation in case
detachment occurs).
-finally, we did cavity mounts on thick ethafoam for the stub boxes, so
they couldn't move around in the box.

If you want to discuss this further, we can talk and I can ever show you
some of the photos I took. Let me know.

Best,
Mariana

*MSc. Mariana Di Giacomo*
PhD candidate University of Delaware
SI Conservation Fellow - Smithsonian NMNH

El vie., 27 jul. 2018 a las 14:13, Carrie A. Eaton (<carrie at geology.wisc.edu>)
escribió:

> 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
> <http://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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