Most of us like to collect things, and some of us have quite a dose of that instinct.
Some folks collect stamps, others collect cigar bands or autographs, a pocket full of
junk, or dollars and dollars. If your collection is larger, even a shade larger than any other
like it in the world, that greatly increases your happiness.
And that's from Alfred Kinsey in An Introduction To Biology.
My name is Chris Johnson. I'm the collection manager for the Division of Invertebrate Zoology.
We estimate the size of the insect collection at the American Museum of Natural History
to be about 18 million. The size of the gall wasp collection is over seven and a half million.
So, at seven and a half million specimens, you see that this family is certainly
the largest single group.
I'm Jim Carpenter. I'm the Chairman of the Division of Invertebrate Zoology and
Peter J. Solomon Family Curator of Hymenoptera.
The primary part of our gall wasp collection is the Kinsey collection.
Alfred Kinsey was actually a famous sexologist but he was also an entomologist before he
studied human sexuality and he collected gall wasps - shelves and shelves and shelves and
shelves and shelves.
I have to admit, just myself, I can't imagine how ginormous his operation must have been
to do what he did. It's just astonishing.
Kinsey's first scientific paper was published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of
Natural History and those associated specimens were already here. So in 1958, after he passed
away, his wife donated the bulk of his collection to the Museum.
Kinsey actually traveled throughout the United States, through 36 states, over 18,000 miles,
just collecting plant material and then taking that plant material into his lab and then
actually reared the wasps from these galls that he collected.
Now what galls are are plants' induced tissue. The female lays her eggs into plants and after
that, the larva hatches, feeds on the tissue and then the galls are brought about by the
plant's response to larval saliva.
Once you see a gall, and you notice a gall on a plant, you will never not see them again.
They can be on leaves, they can be in branches. And if you start looking at galls and you
see the incredible diversity, it's just spectacular.
It's- Some of them look like echinoderms, some of them look like fuzzy caterpillars.
Some of them look like bits of fluff. Some of them look like goiters. Some of them can
be quite tiny. Some of them can be quite large.
My name is Christine Lebeau. I am a scientific assistant in Invertebrate Zoology.
The Kinsey donation is so large that it hasn't been entirely unpacked. So, we've had volunteers
and interns work with us over the years to slowly unpack the remaining boxes.
Back in Kinsey's time, it was of course part and parcel of insect taxonomy to gather very
long series of a single species.
In the case of making measurements of species, which was one of the things Kinsey was doing,
well, the more the merrier.
Collections are more useful if there's material from across the entire range of a species
because variation in structure, in physiology, and genetics can occur in response to environmental
differences.
One of the good things about having so many specimens is you can look at differences in
what is being collected over time. You can correlate it with weather, with temperature,
with rainfall.
Another advantage of the size of this collection, the sheer scale of it, is the possibility
of ancient DNA being found. Ancient DNA refers to the DNA in preserved specimens. And the
"ancient" is relatively speaking, in this case.
In recent years, with the development of better technology, it's becoming possible to get
DNA out of preserved insect specimens. But, particularly for small insects - and we are
talking small in the case of the gall wasp - typically, you have to destroy the whole
specimen to successfully amplify DNA from it.
But we have such large series of so many of those species that the destructive sampling
of some specimens is of no concern.
We can loan out 10,000 specimens at a time. We recently had someone borrow 10,000 specimens
for their PhD project.
New species are being published on. About a year or so ago, a researcher in Spain named
a wasp after me. Andricus lebeaue, I believe, is the correct pronunciation.
What does your wasp look like?
Small and brown just like the others.
I certainly started as an insect collector when I was a teenager, in the hopes of making
a large insect collection. The larger it is, the more likely it is that you'll have more
species. And that makes it more complete.
It's supposed to reflect actual diversity of nature in the world.