On the outskirts of Ann Arbor, Michigan, in a nondescript building surrounded by pine trees and overgrown lawns, is one of the largest university collections in the world, encompassing zoology, paleontology, botany, and anthropological archaeology in its wings. Within the University of Michigan’s Museum of Zoology is contained the largest herpetological collection in the world, and, just beside it, the oft-underappreciated entomological collections of over 4.5 million arthropods—a mega-diverse phylum of invertebrate animals with exoskeletons and segmented bodies. Our specimens date back centuries and come from practically everywhere in the world; many are donations made by private collectors who amassed tens of thousands of insects throughout their lives. Some animals enshrined in our cabinets are the last representatives of extinct species; others hold invaluable environmental data for eras past in the pollen still clinging to their limbs. These ambassadors for entomology have already taught us so much about evolution, phylogeny, and climate change by acting as miniature windows into natural history.
A bee (Andrena nitida) from Germany, 1892, shows temporal and geographic depth of the collection.
Photograph by A’liya Spinner; Credit: “Andrena nitida.” In the digital collection University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, Insect Division Collection. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/i/insect2ic/x-ummzi-231219/ummzi-231219. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.
But so many more of our own specimens are virtually unknown to their stewards. Massive donations or collecting events are often not “processed” immediately—that is, individual animals typically do not receive a catalog number, entry into our database, and are not sorted into the collections with others of their kind due to the massive volume of specimens. Instead, species of high interest may be “picked out” while the rest are hidden in boxes, cases, and cabinets to be sorted at a later date. Sometimes, that “later date” is decades away.
For the past four years, my job has been to rescue some of these lost souls. Funded by a National Science Foundation grant that aims to analyze Hymenopterans—the Order of ants, bees, and wasps—from across time to study the impact of climate change on body shape and size, I have personally and lovingly given over 20,000 bees a unique catalog number and, after months of re-curating our collections, a permanent home in neatly sorted cases now accessible to researchers. We’ve had visitors come to scrape pollen samples from our specimens, verify (or disprove!) that individuals found in unusual places have been correctly identified down to the species, and measure differences in body sizes across decades and localities.
Two Xylocopa fimbriata specimens show within-species diversity – and also how massive they are! The Xylocopa on the right also displays a “cryptic tag,” which requires a lot of research and guesstimating to place geographically.
Photographs by A’liya Spinner; Credit: “Xylocopa fimbriata.” In the digital collection University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, Insect Division Collection. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/i/insect2ic/x-ummzi-239060/ummzi-239060 and https://quod.lib.umich.edu/i/insect2ic/x-ummzi-239053/ummzi-239053. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.
But that isn’t the only way we’re making our archives accessible: for every animal, we enter their unique ID, species, the date of collection, location of collection, sex, and host plant (if available) into our online database which can be queried from around the world, not only by scientists, but by artists who use our specimens as references for their work and biographers detailing the lives of prominent collectors. Already, the locality data from our older specimens (dating from the 1800s and earlier) show the shifting habitats of pollinators in response to environmental pressures: species are forced further North, chasing their ideal temperatures, or begin to speciate as historical populations are broken apart by human-made barriers.
A Bombus ashtoni (Bumblebee) with a determination label reading “Psithyrus.” Until the 1990s, Psithyrus was considered its own genus (Cuckoo bee) until it was reassessed to be a parasitic subgenus of Bombus and species were renamed. Our collections were never updated to reflect this, and several hundred bumblebees remained lost in a distant cabinet until I stumbled upon them.
Photograph by A’liya Spinner; Credit: “Bombus ashtoni.” In the digital collection University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, Insect Division Collection. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/i/insect2ic/x-ummzi-250541/ummzi-250541. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.
Now, my work as an archivist is threatened by sweeping cuts to climate change research and museum collections. Without the work of curators and curatorial assistants like myself, the unknown will remain hidden for decades more, quietly disintegrating in the lonely darkness. These animals were sacrificed1 for more than this—even dead for centuries, the information they offer can help save their living descendants. Every additional record in our database makes science a little more accessible and encourages global cooperation by digitally connecting collections separated by thousands of miles. Our natural history is held in these archives, a history which can only be discovered through support for both the collection and its stewards.
- The term “sacrifice” is used among field scientists who collect specimens for study and laboratory scientists who experiment on model animals. For an examination of “sacrifice” in the context of living laboratory animals, see Arnold B. Arluke, “Sacrificial Symbolism in Animal Experimentation: Object or Pet?” Anthrozoös 2, no. 2 (1988), 98-117.
