[Nhcoll-l] Minimum viable mammal specimen

Fri Feb 9 13:31:55 EST 2024

John's excellent mail reminds me that in our wet-storage room here we have a large donated collection of birds that were - unusually - preserved whole in alcohol. These thus retain their parasites, gut contents, organs - the whole ecosystem. Five of them in a gallon jar, however, represent the same storage liability as a whole drawer of well-prepared study skins.
Our new project HaptoNet aims to re-examine collections of marine benthic organisms - primarily mollusks - and catalog all those organisms, such as sponges, hydroids, bryozoans, barnacles and tubeworms - whose presence up to now we have grudgingly tolerated but ignored in terms of digitization. What we need to know about conditions on the sea floor over the last 350 years, however, now makes them just as important as any more "glamorous" organism. "Climate change," as someone said, "makes hypocrites of us all." As John points out, it also calls the (historic) organization of our collections into question.

Paul Callomon
Collection Manager, Malacology and General Invertebrates

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Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, Philadelphia
callomon at ansp.org<mailto:callomon at ansp.org> Tel 215-405-5096 - Fax 215-299-1170

________________________________
From: Nhcoll-l <nhcoll-l-bounces at mailman.yale.edu> on behalf of John E Simmons <simmons.johne at gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, February 9, 2024 1:18 PM
To: Hawkins, Rebecca K. <rkhawkins at ou.edu>
Cc: nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu <nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu>
Subject: Re: [Nhcoll-l] Minimum viable mammal specimen

External.

Thank you, Rebecca Hawkins, for bringing up this problem that we, the natural history collections community need to discuss.

I sympathize with the problem of crowded collections. I don’t know of a heavily used natural history collection anywhere that does not have this problem. However, I don’t think selecting a few essential parts of a specimen is a good idea. As several responses have already pointed out, there are research uses for all parts of a specimen, and we keep finding new uses for all parts of a specimen. The history of use of natural history collections tells us very clearly that there is an unending variety of ways to use specimens, particularly as advances in technology enable us to look at specimens in entirely new ways. Which brings us to a collecting conundrum—we should be making collections for future research, not just present research, but what will future researchers need? We don’t know. What we do know is that the large amount of literature on uses of natural history collections, taken all together, makes a strong argument for keeping all parts of organisms rather than just traditional preparations or reduced parts of specimens.

What museums should be doing is diversifying the types of preparations for specimens they are collecting now (natural history museums should be actively collecting to document the effects of climate change). Traditional study skins are still useful, but so are full skeletons, fluid-preserved specimens, and many other types of preparations. One of the problems is that modern collections reflect the traditions in the various “-ologies,” which is why mammal collections have traditionally had mostly skins and skulls, bird collections mostly skins with a partial skull intact, amphibian, reptile, and fish collections but whole animals in fluid, insects are pinned, and so on. These traditional preparations often fail to provide the kind of specimens needed for future research.

To address the very serious problem you have brought up about “specimen footprint” (that is a very descriptive term and we should all start using it)—there are several approaches to solving the problem. To mention just a few:

1-We need new designs for collection storage furniture to make better use of space while still allowing efficient monitoring of specimens (without having to pick them up or move them). We need to re-think drawer size and shape, cabinet configurations, the use of wide shelving vs narrow shelving, making better use of compactors, the size and shape of specimens and specimen containers, and so forth.

2-We can house specimen parts separately. Consider that most skulls are not the same shape as study skins, round jars are not necessarily the best shape to hold fluid-preserved specimens, skeletons need individual containers but study skins usually do not, etc.

3-This next suggestion often results in me being called a heretic, but it is, in fact, the easiest and most cost-effective way to make better use of space that we have right now. The suggestion is that we should abandon attempts at so-called “systematic arrangements” of collection storage arrays and instead develop collection storage arrays that are designed to better use space while providing the best storage environment for the collection (for example, bones tolerate a wider range of temperature and humidity than do skins). Particularly considering the flood of taxonomic changes resulting from molecular systematics, and the need to collect more specimens now to document climate change, our old collection storage arrays are a liability. We need to start by assessing the size and shape of specimens and containers, then consider the environmental requirements, and then develop storage arrays that are a better use of space and use the collection database to find specimen, not a faux systematic arrangement (no linear arrangement can be phylogenetic, and I have never seen a branching sequence of cabinets or shelving). Non-systematic arrangements can accommodate collection growth far more efficiently than traditional collection storage arrays.

There have been a few publications addressing the problem of crowded natural history collection storage. I will list a few below, and hope that people will add those that I have missed.

At the 2022 SPNHC meeting in Edinburgh there was a session on “Managing Long-Term Sustainability in an Uncertain Future” that included several presentations directly addressing the topic of best use of storage space. Not all of the speakers published papers based on their presentations, so if you are interested, check the abstracts from the meeting.

One last thing—before anyone rejects the idea of non-systematic arrangements for natural history collections, please take time to read the paper below by Cohen et al. listed below and look carefully at the amount of space they saved.

Thanks again to Rebecca for bringing up this very important topic for discussion.

--John

Callomon, P. 2019. An improved design for the storage of fluid-preserved specimens in small to medium-sized containers. SPNHC Connection 33(2):28-32.

Cohen, A. E., D. A. Hendrickson, and M. J. Casarez. 2019. An alternative shelving arrangement for natural history collection objects to optimize space and task efficiency. Collection Storage 33(1):55-72.

McAlpine, D. F., and F. W. Schueler. 2018. Herpetology meets botany: using herbarium methods to archive dried skins of frogs and snakes. Herpetological Review 49(2):236-238.

Simmons, J. E. 2013. Application of preventive conservation to solve the coming crisis in collections management. Collection Forum 27(1-2):89-101.

Simmons, J. E. and Y. Muñoz-Saba. 2003. The theoretical bases of collections management. Collection Forum 18(1-2):38-49.

John E. Simmons
Writer and Museum Consultant
Museologica
and
Investigador Asociado, Departamento de Ornitologia
Museo de Historia Natural, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima

On Fri, Feb 9, 2024 at 9:43 AM Hawkins, Rebecca K. <rkhawkins at ou.edu<mailto:rkhawkins at ou.edu>> wrote:
Hello all,

Here at the Sam Noble Museum, we have been brainstorming about mammal prep types that would minimize a specimen's footprint in the collection space while maximizing research potential, which we have dubbed the 'minimum viable specimen' in conversation. Such a concept would be useful for larger mammals like coyotes, which—in large numbers—would take a lot of time and effort to prepare and would be spatially expensive to store as stuffed skins and skeletons. With minimum viable specimens, large mammals could be collected in larger sample sizes crucial for research like characterizing population variability and change over time.

Right now we are thinking that a minimum viable mammal specimen consists of a skull, skin swatch, and tissues (muscle and liver?), but would like to open this discussion to other museums as it could benefit all. Thanks!

Rebecca Hawkins (she/her)
Curatorial Associate
Sam Noble Museum
2401 Chautauqua Ave.
Norman, OK 73072
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