[Nhcoll-l] prepping frozen herps

[Elizabeth Wommack]

Hi Tonya,

We make frozen herps into ETOH specimens too. Since we get a majority of
our herps from salvage, frozen is how most of our herps arrive at the
museum. They turn out ok, and we can often take tissue samples out from
them as well.

cheers,
Beth

On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 10:46 PM Carol Spencer <atrox10 at gmail.com> wrote:

> ◆ This message was sent from a non-UWYO address. Please exercise caution
> when clicking links or opening attachments from external sources.
>
> We make frozen herps into ethanol specimens all the time. They’re not as
> flexible as fresh ones but they still look fine and make good specimens.
> Unless you really need them as skeletons, you can prepare them as ethanol
> herps.
>
> On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 9:26 PM Haff, Tonya (NCMI, Crace) <
> Tonya.Haff at csiro.au> wrote:
>
>> Hello all,
>>
>>
>>
>> I have read (in John Simmon’s book on herpetological collecting, among
>> other places) that frozen snake and lizard specimens do not make suitable
>> formalin-preserved specimens, and should be instead skeletonised. We have
>> quite a few herp specimens in the freezer that we have been planning on
>> prepping as ‘pickles’ (fixed in formalin and then stored in ETOH), but  I
>> haven’t started yet because of the concern that it may not be worthwhile. I
>> wonder if any of you could weigh in on this and tell me what your
>> experiences have been, and whether or not you would bother preserving these
>> specimens in spirit, or if we should just prep them as skeletons?
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>>
>>
>> Tonya
>>
>>
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Dr. Tonya M. Haff
>>
>> Collection Manager
>>
>> Australian National Wildlife Collection
>>
>> CSIRO
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Nhcoll-l mailing list
>> Nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
>> https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/nhcoll-l
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> NHCOLL-L is brought to you by the Society for the Preservation of
>> Natural History Collections (SPNHC), an international society whose
>> mission is to improve the preservation, conservation and management of
>> natural history collections to ensure their continuing value to
>> society. See http://www.spnhc.org for membership information.
>> Advertising on NH-COLL-L is inappropriate.
>>
> --
> Sent from Gmail Mobile
>


-- 
Elizabeth Wommack, PhD
Curator and Collections Manager of Vertebrates
University of Wyoming Museum of Vertebrates
Berry Biodiversity Conservation Center
University of Wyoming,
Laramie, WY 82071
ewommack@ <ewommack at berkeley.edu>uwyo.edu
pronouns: she, her, herself
www.uwymv. <http://www.uwymv.edu/>org
UWYMV Collection Use Policy
<http://www.uwymv.org/index.php/download_file/view/43/143/>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/nhcoll-l/attachments/20220426/24b3c49e/attachment.html>