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Hi everyone, welcome to Curious By Nature. I'm Allen.
I work with insects at the Nature Museum and today we're going behind the scenes to look at our insect collections.
The entomology collection contains over 70,000 specimens, the majority of which are butterflies and moths.
There are, however, also dragonflies and damselflies, cockroaches, praying mantises,
true bugs, beetles, caddisflies, ants, bees and wasps, and flies among other insects.
Specimens in this collection date as far back as 1834.
Most of the insects in our collection are pinned specimens.
Adult insects are relatively easy to preserve because their hard exoskeletons retain their shape and features
as long as they're kept in dry, stable conditions.
Mounting insects on pins allows us to carefully pick them up to observe them closely
and move them around safely without damaging them.
The space that houses our entomology collection is lined with cabinets full of Cornell drawers.
Cornell drawer is simply a wooden box of standard dimensions with a glass lid and a foam lined bottom to hold pin specimens.
By using only one type of drawer we can easily move them
between cabinets as they're worked on or studied while keeping the collections well organized.
Soft-bodied insects and other arthropods that cannot be pinned, like ticks,
are stored in glass vials filled with alcohol.
Unmounted butterflies can be stored in glassine envelopes to save space and can later be hydrated for pinning.
The Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Network collection was assembled early in the program's creation.
Founded in 1987, the Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Network is a community
science project that trains volunteers to track butterfly populations throughout the state.
These collections were instrumental in initially documenting local butterfly diversity
and in developing identification strategies.
While many butterflies are rather easy to identify due to their bright color patterns,
some groups, like the skippers, are more challenging.
There is no better way to master identification of a group of insects than by observing real specimens.
Some animals, like the Xerces blue butterfly, can no longer be found in nature as they've gone extinct.
Scientific collections remain as one of the only ways to study them, providing a window
into some of our nature's irreversible history.
Our entomology collections help us study endangered, threatened, or locally imperiled butterflies
that are part of our butterfly conservation programs.
At the Nature Museum, we're working to re-establish populations of butterflies to areas where they've gone missing.
To do this, we collect a small number of butterflies from a robust population,
bring them back to the lab where they can lay hundreds to thousands of eggs each, which are
then raised in a controlled environment until they're old enough to release
at the appropriate restored historic location.
After a butterfly finishes laying all their eggs and expires,
they can be added to the collection for further study.
They can be compared to specimens in the collection that were collected before their populations were ever imperiled
and they can provide future DNA samples to study population genetics among other things.
Each individual specimen in our scientific collections is meticulously labeled.
These labels contain information on what species it is, where it was collected, when it was collected,
who collected it, and a reference number.
This provides valuable information for research and allows us to quickly locate a specimen within the collection.
In addition to our scientific collections, a teaching collection is housed within this area of our facility.
This collection contains specimens that are either missing key pieces of information on their labels
or are unlikely to be used for scientific research.
When a new species is discovered, it is made official by publishing a description in the scientific literature.
In the description, a single specimen representative of the species, called a holotype, is designated
and deposited into a research collection.
This gives scientists a permanent reference to identify a given species.
Sometimes a researcher will base their new species description on a group of individuals.
In this case, one is designated as the original holotype and any others used to help write the
description are designated as paratypes.
Here are several paratypes from one such series used to originally describe a species of geometer moth.
If you're wondering what on earth is a geometer moth, perhaps if you've heard of their caterpillars which are called inchworms.
Thank you for joining me on this tour of our insect collections.
That's all I have to show you today.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below,
and make sure you subscribe to our channel so you never miss an episode.
See you next time on Curious By Nature.