Over the last year and a half on The Brain Scoop, you've all watched as I've:
squeezed disgusting goo out of a squirrel's face [Squirrel McNastyface],
dismembered an anteater [Hosenose],
taken apart a two-faced calf [The Two-Faced Calf],
and dissected a wolf [Gutting the Wolf].
While this has all been a disgusting adventure into animal anatomy,
it's also served an underlying scientific purpose and that's not just to see me covered in animal guts.
Really, these animals are all prepared for museums [bird prep] in a way that will inform future generations about changes in species over time.
That wolf will forever be housed at The University of Montana, and the information gathered from its radio collar an invaluable tool
that will be used to inform biologists and wildlife managers to the whereabouts of that individual over the course of its entire life.
That's just one piece in a very large puzzle that biologists attempt to put together when trying to better understand biodiversity and ecosystems.
The wolf getting hit by a car was not a natural death, but it was one that most people can accept.
We salvaged something that otherwise would have been thrown away, and its value to science a lost opportunity.
So when a few Arizona State University scientists published an opinion piece in Science magazine last month
stating that the collection of specimens by biologists in the field was contributing to overall species extinctions worldwide, I felt a little bit conflicted.
We haven't explicitly addressed the topic of biological collecting here on The Brain Scoop, or the potential need for biologists to collect voucher specimens—
—that means botanical or zoological specimens that are studied in the field and later placed in museums or research collections, like all of the snakes that are in this room here.
It is absolutely true that salvaged roadkill and birds that hit windows contribute to a large number of new specimens in museums,
but relying on those new additions alone doesn't tell us enough about the bigger picture.
So, what's the controversy? Well, those few Arizona State University scientists are recommending
that field biologists cease the collection of voucher specimens and instead rely on tissue sampling and photo documentation in lieu of collecting.
That opinion resulted in a response paper coauthored by more than 100 biologists representing 59 of the top research institutions and museums across the world who politely disagree.
But the thing about a magazine like Science is that it's behind a paywall - meaning that the general public isn't even aware that this conversation is happening.
If a museum has hundreds of, let's say, bats, don't they have enough? Not exactly.
Museum specimens are like library books full of information [...full of bats] that can be referred back to again and again.
For example, a bat collected in the Montana territories in the early 1900s can tell us not only about that species' distribution—
—meaning where it was initially found—but by housing it in a museum collection, it can be continuously studied to see change over time.
We can infer genetic information from the tissues that give us insight into what the climate was like in that region.
By continuing to collect bats from the same area, we can begin to see how that landscape is changing,
and this continuous monitoring can signal when those populations are in danger of things like
disease, human impact, or predation by invasive species.
Voucher specimens are compensatory, not additive, to mortality rates of certain species.
That means if you've got a detrimental epidemic, like the white-nose syndrome, which is responsible for killing more than 5.7 million hibernating bats in the last 7 years,
collecting a few hundred live bats to study how the disease spreads can prevent the extinction of entire populations by providing new knowledge on how to combat the disease.
This type of biological study can also inform health professionals on the spread of infectious diseases,
which, as you know, can have incredible impact on human populations.
Samples taken from the afflicted animals can then be compared to voucher specimens that were taken from the same area
years -- sometimes decades, or even centuries before -- in order to identify the disease's origin.
Take this for example: In the 1960s, eggs from museum collections were used to discover that
high levels of chlorinated hydrocarbons in the pesticide DDT were resulting in the decline of bird species.
Researchers on the project were able to look at eggs collected in the same area before the use of DDT and noticed that egg shells were thinning in the DDT era.
This was causing incredibly high nesting failures and nearly led to the extinction of a number of raptors and other birds.
Had biologists not been consistently collecting birds and eggs from North America since the 1880s,
we may still be using DDT today without fully understanding its environmental impact. [the case for voucher specimens]
Let's also make it clear that biologists aren't just going out and setting traps for random animals willy-nilly.
The collection of any plant or animal is informed by previous studies of that region and its ecosystems, and regulated by state and national permits. [The Field Museum Bahamas expedition 1929]
[specimen observation] Additionally, biologists adhere to strict moral and ethical codes that are not unlike those taken by doctors
[specimen collection] when they vow to do everything in their power to facilitate the health and safety of their patients.
That same critical thinking applies before biologists even begin to consider taking specimens from a certain region.
If the population of that species is discovered to be small or very uniquely distributed, then alternative methods for study are practiced.
And if you're thinking, "I'm not going to be affected by bats with nose fungus," then you're going to be singing a different tune
when insect populations, some of which can carry diseases that are transferred to humans,
blow out of control because their top predators are extinct. [think more mosquitoes]
We can't even begin to predict how museums and their collections are going to come in handy in the future,
but one thing remains certain: if researchers are not allowed the resources necessary in order to make informed decisions about the health of our collective world,
then we can't hope to preserve species of any type, including our own... and that affects everybody.
The Brain Scoop is brought to you by The Field Museum in Chicago.
... it still has brains on it.