[Nhcoll-l] many specimens in one jar

[Callomon,Paul]

Our wet mollusk collection used to have jars containing multiple individual lots in separate glass vials, stoppered with cotton. We abandoned this practice in favor of individual vials or jars for each lot (like Andy's fishes, mollusks are cataloged as lots, not specimens). The reasons were:

  *   The failure of a single lid doomed all the lots in the jar
  *   There was some evidence that exudates from one lot (such as mitrid snails, which can give off dark, tissue-staining fluids for months after pickling) were contaminating the whole jar
  *   Retrieving individual lots (for a loan, for example) was a messy business
The original justification for keeping multiple lots in a jar was to save space, but we came up with a storage system that allowed individual containers in a smaller footprint. You can see it at:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337950870_An_improved_design_for_the_storage_of_fluid-preserved_specimens_in_small_to_medium-sized_containers
A smaller number of larger jars wastes more space than the opposite; think about the "spandrel space" between four jars on a shelf.
Paul Callomon
Collection Manager, Malacology and General Invertebrates
________________________________
Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University
1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia PA 19103-1195, USA
prc44 at drexel.edu<mailto:prc44 at drexel.edu> Tel 215-405-5096 - Fax 215-299-1170




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