Collections in Crisis

Last week I attended the Canadian Botanical Association/Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections joint conference in our nation’s capitol. I was able to meet Curators and Collection Managers from Museums all over the world, as well as attend a tour of the collections facilities at the Agriculture Canada Central Experimental Farm and the Canadian Museum of Nature.

Just about every person I talked to told me about how they are storing specimens in their hallways due to lack of space, losing knowledgeable Curators and collections staff at their institutions (sometimes only half their original staff is left), and scrounging for funding to digitize their collections and facilitate biodiversity research around the world.

I don’t have a problem with technology per se; I use the internet and e-mail daily, and I record field data using a PDA and a GPS. But lots of people can’t seem to stop using technology (e.g. cell phones) and become blind to everything else around them (e.g. innocent pedestrians). I once heard about a woman who fell into an open manhole because she was too busy sending a text message to actually pay attention to where she was going!

Oscar Wilde once said that “we know the price of everything but the value of nothing.” The fact that so little money is spent on even the most basic biodiversity work (we don’t even know the number of species on the earth within an order of magnitude) suggests that we as a society do not value it at all, even though it is the most valuable thing on earth. Perhaps the ecological and economic catastrophe that BP (and in fact everyone who drives a car) is responsible for in the Gulf of Mexico will help to change our minds about what is truly important: thriving, functioning ecosystems that help to feed and employ millions of people, or cheap oil for our gas-guzzling SUV’s? Subsidies for big corporations or money for scientific research and conservation? The choice is ours to make.

Does anyone remember the book “101 Uses for a Dead Cat” that came out in the 1980’s? I know, I know animal rights activists accused the cartoonist of encouraging cruelty to animals but I can’t imagine that anyone took it seriously. I mean who would ever turn a dead cat into a pencil sharpener or a pair of roller blades?

So in the interest of education, here’s my own take on the what-to-do-with-a-dead-something theme, with the goal of letting everyone know some of the things that dead plants at The Manitoba Museum, and at other Museums and Universities, are really used for.

11. Documenting the ecological relationships between plants, animals, and fungi.

12. Documenting changes in ecosystems over time (i.e. sand dune stabilization rates).

13. Documenting the location of illegal marijuana and poppy fields.

14. Documenting the mutations that occur when native plants are bombarded with gamma radiation (we have an entire collection of mutant plants from the Whiteshell Nuclear Research Establishment stored here).

15. Determining the authenticity of wooden artifacts (e.g. did this wooden necklace really come from a lost tribe in New Guinea? Not if it’s made of Bur Oak!).

21. Indicating water quality. The presence of certain plants indicates salinity in the groundwater.

22. Documenting the kinds of plants that were used by ancient peoples and how they were used. I’ve had to identify fossilized seeds found in clay pots during the Museum’s archaeological digs.

23. Determining which wild plants are ancestral to our modern cultivars.

24. Helping scientists identify plants that may produce useful chemicals for modern medicine and other industrial applications.

25. Determining the distribution of species.

26. Determining the habitat requirement of species (this is useful information for reclamation scientists).

27. Indicating the location of certain metals such as nickel.

28. Acting as a reference collection for the identification of species.

35. Determining how plants distribute their seeds.

36. Aiding in forensics investigations. Museum collections have been used to identify plant materials found at crime scenes and on the clothing of suspects.

37. Preparing manuscripts, books, floras, field guides and DVD’s that facilitate the identification of plant species by farmers, agronomists, consultants, government employees, students and naturalists.

When the great British explorer William Dampier began collecting plants back in the late 1600’s he had no idea that his specimens would be used for the purposes that I have just listed. I am humbled to think that the specimens that I collect will someday be used in marvellous and completely inconceivable ways to help our species’ collective descendants solve some of the problems they will inevitably be faced with.

With field season right around the corner I find that I spend a lot of time reminiscing about my past field work, and musing about what makes a perfect field day. I would say that it goes something like this:

• 1 reliable vehicle
• Good, dry roads and trails, to taste
• 1 part nice weather: 20-24°C with a gentle wind
• 1 beautiful landscape
• 1 (or more) exciting discoveries or observations
• 0 irritating insects

I had a perfect field day once. I was in the Frenchman River Valley of southern Saskatchewan surveying potential routes for a new highway. My plan was to walk the entire length of one route to document the vegetation and identify rare plants. My car didn’t break down or get stuck in mud on the way there. The weather was perfect and the view spectacular. There were thousands of beautiful wildflowers covering the hillsides. Meadowlarks were singing. I found a really cool snakeskin and bird’s nest. There were no mosquitoes. Ah if only every field day was this good.

Sadly most field days are not perfect. Just about anything that can go wrong has gone wrong for me at one time or another. I’ve dropped my portable computer on a rock and lost a morning’s worth of data. I’ve spend an entire day taking pictures only to realize later that I had forgotten to put my card in the camera. I’ve nearly gotten lost. My vehicle has broken down in the middle of nowhere (on several occasions). I’ve locked my keys in the car, miles from a gas station, in an area with no cell phone coverage. I’ve gotten blisters and bug bites and heat exhaustion. I’ve done field work in pouring rain, frosty August mornings (one of Mother Nature’s cruel jokes) and blistering heat.

Image: I spent a cold, rainy June morning collecting plants at West Shoal Lake, Manitoba.

Like many field scientists I’ve had numerous uncomfortable days but fortunately no real tragic ones. Tragedies do happen on occasion so it is important to be as prepared for disaster as you can be. I’ve known at least three biologists who died in helicopter or plane crashes. Another friend was nearly killed by a black bear. Yet another consumed food that was likely contaminated with mycotoxins while working abroad and eventually died of liver cancer.

So by now you might be thinking I’m a bit crazy and that maybe a nice desk job would have been a better career choice. Despite all of the discomforts that I have to put up with I would never have chosen another career. The thrill of exploring the wild areas of our planet, discovering new things and being able to see animals up close and personal rather than through the lens of a camera is amazing. I’ve never been more at peace than I have been sitting on a grassy hillside over a valley or swimming in a remote lake. Even the most miserable day has a few perfect moments in it: seeing morning dew on a spider web, watching the sun shine through the clouds, looking into the eyes of another animal being (as Jane Goodall would call them).

Furthermore I find that experiencing some adversity makes you more appreciative of the good things in life. I’ll never forget the time I had to hike for 40 minutes through wind and pouring rain to harvest seeds in Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan. I was cold, wet and my back and knees were aching from hunching over research plots all day. I was never more appreciative of the simple luxuries of life than I was that night: a bath, dry clothes, hot tea, a warm meal, and a soft bed to sleep in. Most people (at least in what we call the “developed world”) would not consider these things to be luxuries, but I do. For this reason, experiencing hardship, even a little bit, can make you a more compassionate, less materialistic, and ultimately happier person. I spend my days being grateful for what I have, rather than obsessing about what I don’t. So I don’t begrudge the bad field days. At the very least they make good story to tell.

When I started working here at the Museum I used to spend part of my lunch break peeking into cabinets in the natural history collections room. I was amazed at the variety of organisms we have here: trays upon trays of tropical butterflies, huge beetles, giant fungi, exquisite fossils of long-extinct plants and sea creatures. One day I even came across a stuffed duck-billed platypus; an Australian mammal that I’ve been fascinated with since I read about its’ bizarre physiology (they lay eggs yet nurse their babies) in a textbook long ago. When I heard that 2010 was going to be the International Year of Biodiversity, and that we needed a new exhibit in the Museum’s Discovery Room, I thought that it would be a wonderful opportunity to show some of these amazing organisms to people who are not so lucky in their employment opportunities as I am. I’ve been working on this exhibit with the other Natural History Curators, Dr. Randy Mooi and Dr. Graham Young, for the last six months or so and am pleased that it is now open to the public.

Biodiversity is simply the variation of all life forms on earth. Scientists have documented nearly 1.9 million different species, and estimate that there could be more than 50 million that are still unknown to science. Over 1200 new species of flies alone are described every year. Helping to document new species and preserving specimens that scientific descriptions are based on, is one of the main purposes of museums. Museum specimens are used by scientists to study all sorts of things: climate change, disease transmission, and the status of endangered species to name a few. We also care for many specimens that were donated by amateur naturalists and collectors, the source of most of our exotic specimens.

Amazingly, one fifth of all known species are beetles. To illustrate this point, we prepared a display case that contains just beetles, mostly exotic ones, including several huge Rhinoceros beetles. Another goal of this exhibit was to display as wide a variety of organisms as possible, so in addition to the spectacular giant clam and golden pheasant, we included some unusual species that we don’t normally exhibit, like parasites and blue-green algae. To remind people that the biodiversity that exists today evolved from earlier life forms, we’re displaying some fossil specimens, mainly aquatic invertebrates and plants. Several newly acquired specimens-including a very yummy smelling chicken-of-the-woods fungus that nearly ended up on my dinner plate-are displayed as well.

The more I study and observe nature, the more fascinating I find it. I think Charles Darwin expressed this sentiment most elegantly in the last sentence of On the Origin of Species: “…from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” I invite you to come to the Museum this summer to appreciate the beauty of nature and marvel at those endless forms in our new exhibit Natural Wonders: A Celebration of Biodiversity. And yes, my beloved duck-billed platypus is there for you to see.

I suspect that when people hear that I’m a Museum Curator they think of that evil Curator of the British Museum who resurrects the mummy Imhotep from the dead in “The Mummy Returns”. Sadly, my job doesn’t entail raising any long-dead Egyptian priests. Nor do I nurse giant man-eating plants with my own blood and the occasional visitor to my lab a la “The Little Shop of Horrors”. In this blog I will be describing in a bit more detail what a Curator of Botany really does do all day. I’ll be writing about the exhibits that I’m working on, the research that I’m doing and the collections that I’m studying.

So if your curiosity is aroused I hope that you will check out my blog on a regular basis. Summer will soon be here and I’ll be able to tell you all about my field work. In June I’m going mushroom and lichen hunting in Whiteshell Provincial Park. In July and August I’ll be studying pollinators in Birds Hill Provincial Park, and in September I’ll be hunting for some rare plants along the lakeshores and sand dunes of southern Manitoba. Till then you can check out my soon to be posted blog on an exhibit I just helped to prepare called “Natural Wonders: A Celebration of Biodiversity.”