[Nhcoll-l] Specimens vs assemblies

[Callomon,Paul]

Folks,

I'm working with some interesting questions at the moment and thought I'd ask for colleagues' input. Look on it as broader service to science or something.


  1.  I'm dealing today with a sea fan (Cnidaria: Alcyonacea) that bears several wing oysters (Mollusca: Pteriidae) and barnacles (Crustacea: Cirripeda) as well as a couple of tube worms (Annelida: Polychaeta) and countless diatoms. As a collections manager, do I physically separate the individual specimens and send them off to their respective collections (General Invertebrates [Cnidaria], Mollusca and General Invertebrates [Crustacea] and [Annelida]) or preserve the assemblage intact? If they were tigers and snails collected at the same spot, for example, there would be no problem doing this; but snails don't live on tigers.
  2.  If I choose not to separate them (correctly, I think), then once I catalog the individual taxa into their respective databases, into which collection does the assemblage physically go? All four epibionts are attached to the sea fan, so that would seem to have the best claim to priority as it's both a specimen in its own right and a substrate for the others. The problem there is that our General Invertebrates collection is not funded, whereas our mollusk collection is. Our neontological "departments" are all taxon-based and each has its own community of curators, managers, associates and researchers as well as its own demands on space, infrastructure and support.
  3.  Most museums divide their Recent collections by taxon as above. However, this contrasts with Vertebrate and Invertebrate Paleontology, which are pan-taxonomical disciplines. Our Recent crabs, for example, go in the Crustacea collection, away from their commensal mollusk chums, but fossil crabs and mollusks both belong in a single Invertebrate Paleontology collection, while fossil fishes and mammoths snuggle up in the Vertebrate Paleontology collection.
  4.  How then does the existence and maintenance of neontological taxon-based collections (Entomology, Malacology, Mammalogy etc) configure science - does it encourage the emergence of museum entomologists, malacologists and mammalogists over, say, benthic ecologists?

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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