[Nhcoll-l] prepping frozen herps

[Greg Pauly]

As others have mentioned, fixing and preserving frozen herps is common
practice in herpetological collections. I concur with Andy that you want to
be extra diligent with injecting formalin, and also making incisions to
allow the formalin adequate access to internal tissues (especially for
larger snakes and lizards). As soon as the specimen has started to get a
little bit rigid, move it to a formalin bath and keep it in the formalin
bath longer than you would for fresh material. Obviously, take tissue
samples prior to formalin exposure. With a bit of extra attention during
formalin exposure, the resulting specimen will be suitable for all standard
research requests (including things like histological examination of
gonads). The most challenging thing is to get enough formalin exposure to
fully preserve the inside of the GI tract so that dissection for GI
parasites isn't complicated by a decomposing gut lining, but I've found
this is doable even for larger turtles and snakes as long as you thoroughly
inject and move to the formalin bath quickly (I aim for starting at least a
partial formalin bath within 8-12 hours).

Greg

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.
>


-- 
Gregory B. Pauly, Ph.D.
Natural History Museum
of Los Angeles County
900 Exposition Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90007
213-763-3212 (work)
https://nhm.org/research-collections/departments/herpetology
www.facebook.com/LACMherps
www.inaturalist.org/projects/rascals
*He/Him/His*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/nhcoll-l/attachments/20220427/077936ce/attachment.html>