Tag Archives for fluid specimens

It’s Getting Better

Written by Dr Amy Geraghty, Assistant Keeper/Curator of aquatic zoology collections with responsibility for fluid collection management.

The National Museum of Ireland (NMI) Natural History Division (NHD) holds about 2 million specimens in its collection. The collection is ordinarily split between three locations: the museum and two off-site storage buildings. However, at the time of writing, nearly all specimens are in one of the two storage buildings. The museum galleries are being emptied to facilitate investigative works on and the refurbishment of building itself.

One of the National Museum of Ireland’s two storage buildings in 2006. It is an old British army barracks that now stores the fluid collection, some of the dry zoology, mineralogical and paleontological collections. (Image courtesy of Nigel Monaghan)

One of the storage buildings is a mid-nineteenth century British army barracks that came to NMI in the mid-1990s and now stores NHD collections. Retrofitting the building for collection storage has involved the installation of plasterboard ceilings, internal doors, and security and fire alarm systems. Toilets, telephones, a tearoom, shelving, and internet facilities were later installed in the 2000s.

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Rediscovering the Hancock Coelacanth

Written by Dan Gordon, Keeper of Biology, The Great North Museum: Hancock.

For as long as I’d worked at the museum, there’d always been a Coelacanth. People referred to it in passing, pointing out the large tub of orange tinted spirit where it lurked. I’d always rather taken it for granted; an interesting but rather mundane specimen, and I’d never been curious enough to fish it out of the murky liquid and examine it.

That is, until 2018, when staff at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall got in touch about an exhibition they were putting together called Monsters of the Deep. They’d asked us about Coelacanth fossils and I mentioned the Coelacanth in the fish collection, which was greeted with some surprise. A real one…Would we consider a loan? And as I thought about this, I came to realise that I knew very little about the Coelacanth at all.

There was next to nothing in the catalogue about it, so I decided, firstly, to get a better look. This was easier said than done. The Coelacanth is over a metre long and weighed over 20kg, sitting in a container of tea coloured alcohol bigger than a bathtub. Reaching in, I ran my gloved fingers over its flanks, which had the texture of coarse sandpaper. Lifting it out was like wrestling an alligator, but eventually it emerged, a gaping mouth with small sharp teeth, a ragged tear through the flesh of its head, and the huge eyes of a deep-water dweller.

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Snagged Setae 2, The Sequel: Packing Materials After 14 Years in Fluid Storage

By Lu Allington-Jones (Senior Conservator), Wren Montgomery (FTIR Specialist) and Emma Sherlock (Senior Curator), The Natural History Museum, London UK

Many years ago, we undertook some research into a suitable replacement for cotton wool as bungs for vials holding small fluid-stored specimens. In 2008 we placed samples of Parafilm MTM, white Plastazote® LD45 and colourless HDPE (high-density polypropylene) lids in 10% formalin, 100% ethanol, and 80% IMS (Industrial Methylated Spirit, aka Industrial Denatured Alcohol) and allowed them to steep for 3 years. We undertook visual inspections, pH tests and FTIR analysis and concluded that Parafilm MTM was an unsuitable replacement, but that the other materials had undergone no change and had caused no contamination of the host fluids.  

We decided to revisit the samples after an additional 11 years on a south-west facing sunny lab windowsill, for a total of over 14 years of storage in the various fluids. 

The state of ParafilmTM after only 3 years: particles are visible to the naked eye in the 100% ethanol on the left. The ParafilmTM in the formalin on the right showed a thinning and perforation at its edges. ©The Trustees of the Natural History Museum
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Bill Pettit Memorial Fund: Discovery Collections Project

The Bill Pettit Memorial Award was set up a few years ago by NatSCA to support projects including the conservation, access, and use of natural science collections. One of the recent projects we have been able to help with was the curation of some amazing specimens from the voyage of the Discovery. Hear more about the project from Tammy below.

David Gelsthorpe

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In early 2013 we set about organising the task to begin with the curation of the largest, most recent and least organised of the three collections – that of the ECOMAR collection. The start of the ECOMAR project coincided with commissioning of the new UK Royal Research Ship James Cook officially named by the Princess Royal on 6 February 2007. The first ECOMAR cruise departed from Southampton on 13 July 2007. The ECOMAR project was designed to investigate the Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone area which lies approximately mid-way between Iceland and the Azores. Four super stations were defined (two north of the Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone and two to the south), all had the same bottom depth (2500m) and were revisited during voyages by the R.R.S. James Cook and the R.R.S. Discovery during the years 2007–2010 to replicate sampling, time-series investigations and flux studies.

The Discovery Collections have no full-time curatorial post and we rely on the goodwill and interest of students and other volunteers (including scientific visitors and work experience volunteers) to help with cataloguing, labelling, respiriting, and general curatorial jobs. The samples, though incredibly valuable should be considered at risk. I look after the collections in as much that I manage the visitors to the collections, host students, and manage public enquiries, visits and displays of the specimens. I am also a taxonomist employed to conduct research, describing new species and studying the ecology of the deep-sea benthic fauna. I was employed for four years to work on the ECOMAR program to describe the ecology of the scavenging fauna of the area. I therefore had a particular interest in the curation of this collection.

We employed Amanda Serpell-Stevens, to work on this project, but we had funds for only 8 weeks of her time. Thus the project was reduced from cataloguing the three large collections to just one. When Amanda’s contract ended there was still much reshelving and reordering of the material to be carried out which was carried out on an ad hoc basis by myself, a retired member of staff, Mike Thurston, and Amanda who returned on a voluntary basis to continue work on the project.

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The project began by working shelf by shelf to curate and to catalogue (in paper record) what was held including location and size of each jar, and to change containers for those specimens that were in plastic containers or inappropriate sized jars. The preservative was also replaced in most of the jars and a new label produced for each specimen, as many were poorly labelled. This curation and cataloguing process took the majority of the 8 weeks, with just enough time remaining to enter the data into Excel.

With the availability of a digital catalogue the task of reorganising the lots into taxonomic order was greatly eased. This meant adjustment of shelf heights to incorporate the various sizes of tubs and jars (some of the lots are 20 litre tubs full of holothurian specimens of a single species), and removing all the specimens in turn, which were then replaced first by taxonomic order then by station order using Excel to sort the data. The spreadsheet was updated with the new locations of the specimens as we progressed. The final part of the process involved cross referencing the specimens with the newly published papers and updating the names where they had changed (on both the specimen labels and in the spreadsheet).

There were numerous new species described during the ECOMAR project, which meant further problems in allocating the correct new name to specimens in the collections variously named as e.g. Peniagone sp. nov ‘pink’. While holotypes have been registered in the NHM, London, the rest of the material needs updating to current knowledge, a process which is often neglected, despite it being referenced in the many new publications resulting from the project.

It is very satisfying to have the ECOMAR collection properly curated and to know that I can locate any specimen needed easily. In total we curated, relabelled and catalogued a total of 1300 lots comprised of 1148 smaller jars, 88 tubs (between 5 and 20 litres) and 64 loan specimens. We plan to publish a detailed analysis of this work for the NatSCA journal, including a list of available species, and will make the catalogue available online when time and funding allow. In the meantime interested parties can contact Tammy Horton (tammy.horton@noc.ac.uk) for a copy.

Dr Tammy Horton
Ocean Biogeochemistry and Ecosystems
National Oceanography Centre,
Waterfront Campus,
European Way, Southampton SO14 3ZH
UK