Curran, one of the better known earlier researchers on the taxonomy of Diptera flies , while visiting friends for dinner found some splendid examples of fly larvae in the spinach being served, but ate them without speaking of their presence to his hosts. This incident is an example that combines fortitude, knowledge and manners. The term for eating insects is entomophagy. Throughout the history of mankind, eating insects has actually been a common idea. In the United States, the population has been rather guarded, however, of utilizing this valuable commodity.
This causes some amusement when one considers that honey is a common product, but actually has been regurgitated by insects in its production. Parts of insects are consumed by humans more commonly than generally expected. It is impossible to perfectly eliminate all forms of insects when harvesting and processing some crops, thus allowances are set in the United States by the Food and Drug Administration to permit certain numbers of insects or their parts in processed foods.
As one would expect, when insects are eaten in other parts of the world they are usually those that may be gathered in large numbers. Examples are social insects, such as ants, and especially termites, and locusts that migrate in hordes of millions of individuals. The idea was to understand the evolution of this group, as scientists have yet to pin point the exact placement of some families in the tree of life, like Pselaphidae for example.
If we identify the close relatives to the Pselaphinae , we would be able to understand how this family evolved from a common ancestor. How would this common ancestor look like? What would have been its preferred habitat? What would it have been eating? These are the questions we want to answer.
In the laboratory, we first get the DNA from Staphyliniformia specimens and we spend quite a lot of time on a computer to figure out their evolution from molecular data. We use algorithms that convert the DNA into meaningful data, which in turn is used to create the tree of life see the recent research on all insects.
And this is when Josh comes in, as a fantastic volunteer in the molecular lab and here at Origins:. Now I'm bringing the two areas together to complement each other. Josh might be a little confused; this looks like the ladybird section; or is he just looking for out-groups?
This summer I've been working with MRes student Emeline Favreau trying to understand the phylogenetic and evolutionary relationships of the infra-order Staphyliniformia that is the series that contains the Histeroids, Hydrophiloids and Staphylinoids - basically a lot of beetles - more than 74, described species!!
Other than looking at DNA sequences on a computer and scratching my head a lot when faced with using odd computer programmes, I have been trying to identify specimens which have had their DNA sequenced already. Building phylogenetic trees is brilliant, but they only really make sense when the end points nodes have a name at the end! Identifying beetle specimens is often made much easier when you have a reference collection to hand, so it's rather fortuitous that the Coleoptera collection is two minutes' walk from where I've been based!
I also assisted Beulah with putting together a Staphylinid loan which mostly consisted of specimens belonging to the genus Bolitogyrus - a geographically interesting lineage, but they are also extremely cool looking!
A revision of the Neotropical species of Bolitogyrus Chevrolat, a geographically disjunct lineage of Staphylinini Coleoptera, Staphylinidae. This revision uses NHM specimens and also describes many new species. Ladybirds getting in on the act once more!
Emeline at last Christmas' Coleoptera party Happy Christmas! Max Barclay, collections manager for Coleoptera and Hitoshi Takano, leader of the Coleoptera section's Africa expeditions including extensive exploration of Tanzania and Zambia, tell us about a very exciting find for us Livingstone's beetles Livingstone on the Zambezi. David Livingstone returned to England a national hero in after becoming the first man to undertake a trans-continental journey from the port of Luanda on the Atlantic Coast of Angola to Quelimane in Mozambique where the Zambezi River meets the Indian Ocean.
He published a book of his travels in titled Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa selling a remarkable 70, copies making him a very wealthy man. Livingstone abhorred slavery and had hoped that it could be banished through legitimate commerce. Within only a few months of arrival, the expedition was doomed. On his earlier voyage down the Zambezi, Livingstone was told about, but did not investigate, a set of rapids known as Cahora Bassa in modern day Mozambique.
This set of rapids made it impossible for any vessel to sail up the river even at full flood at the end of the rains. Despite this disappointment, he navigated a tributary of the Zambezi, the Shire River, and became the first Westerner to accurately document Lake Malawi.
The expedition was eventually recalled from London as the results could not justify the cost. The major positives to come out of the expedition were the scientific specimens and observations made by Livingstone and his team. Hitoshi on the banks of the Zambezi at Ngonye Falls. The natural history specimens. There were large quantities of natural history specimens plants, birds, mammals and reptiles collected on this expedition. In the years following the return of the expedition , many lists and new species were published in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London.
Many of these specimens are in the NHM. It is interesting that there were no lists of insects published from this expedition despite the fact that in the very same year , the insects collected by Captain John Hanning Speke on his pioneering trip to the Great Lakes of Africa were published by Frederick Smith of the BMNH.
Livingstone himself writes in the introduction of his book 'Narrative of and expedition to the Zambesi and its tributaries' on p. Kirk undertake their description, three or four years will be required for the purpose. But where did the beetles go? For comparison, Alfred Russel Wallace, during eight years in the Malay Archipelago , almost single-handedly collected more than 83, beetles, that is over 10, a year, and it is hard to spend a day in the collections without finding more of his material.
Kebrabassa is the same as Cahora Bassa, the site of the rapids that were to doom the whole expedition, and Kirk evidently stumbled across the beetle during the first year of the trip, and dutifully traipsed it around Africa for more than half a decade, bringing it to Gray soon after his return along with a motley collection of other curios.
He was rewarded by a very swift description and a name in his honour; perhaps it was all a bit too swift, because Goliathus kirkianus was soon synonymised with the widespread Goliathus albosignatus Boheman, , which had trumped it for priority by 7 years. It seems that Gray, perhaps in his haste and excitement at finding such a gem in a mixed bag of African oddments, skimped on the paperwork and failed to list the specimen. Of course, this raises the question of what else might have been put in the collection without being properly listed, and may still be lurking there.
The registers are much easier to search through than 22, drawers of almost 10 million beetles. By Dr. Western was a private collector, whose collection of some 10, unsorted beetles was presented to the Museum by his daughter after his death in Marmylida impressa Goldfuss , That was the end of the story until, in , curator Max Barclay was doing a routine inspection of some old boxes of unincorporated material.
Every museum has unincorporated accessions, though in recent years we been systematically sorting, recurating, databasing and incorporating ours into the main collections, where the specimens are safe from pests and available to the world scientific community. After many years of concerted efforts in this direction, we are getting to the bottom of the barrel where old unincorporated accessions are concerned, and most of what is still in loose boxes has been picked over and judged to be of little interest by successive generations of curators.
One particular box was identified as a priority for incorporation - not because it was ostensibly special material - it was 19 th century specimens of common beetles with poor data and in relatively poor condition - but the box had warped and split, and posed an unacceptable risk to its contents.
The original E. Western store box in much need of curatorial care. Western was the same collector who had provided the Marmylida. Hastily Max went through the remaining half dozen boxes and found spread among them a total of 14 specimens of 9 species and three families, all labelled in exactly the same way.
All were common African species. Beetles from E. Western's store box of beetles collected by Livingstone. What is left, by extension, is what was not considered to be of much interest by anyone, though it is apparent that they were all looking at it from a taxonomic rather than a historical point of view.
In those days the modern curatorial practice of taking a box and emptying it, in order to reduce the number of boxes and systematically complete recuration and incorporation one collection after another, and then making a record of what you did, was not established. Therefore, it seems likely that the 14 specimens remaining in the boxes were but a fraction of the Livingstone material possessed by Western.
It was not held as a separate collection, but placed taxonomically across his series, so it seems likely that the vast majority of it has already been incorporated, but the logistics of searching for individual specimens in a whole collection without knowing what species they belong to makes looking for a needle in a haystack seem a matter of routine. We did experiment with picking common species likely to occur in Zambezi and then searching through the main series, and this revealed 4 specimens of the very common flower chafer Diplognatha gagates , but so far nothing else has been traced.
Systematic databasing of the collection will no doubt eventually reveal everything, but this is a slow process and has only just begun. The most parsimonious explanation is that another member of the expedition had fewer scruples, or less financial security than Livingstone, and specimens were sold.
There may have been other lots where the Museum did not bid, or was outbid, and possibly these, or some of these, were bought by Western for his private collection. Of course, if well looked-after, the life-span of an insect specimen is many times the life-span of a collector, so private collections like E.
The clearing of accessions and unincorporated material, as well as widespread databasing and digitising of material in the collections, will no doubt continue to throw up surprises and treasures for years to come. Livingstone explored with maps, a bible and a gun, and a medicine chest, but today some of the last frontiers for exploration are the great Natural History Collections themselves.
How much of Dr. Termophilum alternatum Bates, As the countdown to Science Uncovered begins, we have been busy behind the scenes thinking about how we talk about our science.
Making science accessible to all is one of our big challenges as a leading natural sciences organisation. With upwards of 80 million specimens 10 million of those are beetles! Essentially we want to share our data; but, if I told you for our 10 million beetles we have just six curators, how is it even conceivable for us to make that data accessible?! It took the creative mind of Ivvet Modinou the Museum's science communication manager and one of the leading people behind the Museum's participation in the EU's Researchers night to come up with a grand plan that would unite scientists and our visitors YOU!
Max with just a few beetles that we would love to be imaged! Laurence in the heady days of Hemiptera true bug research in the Coleoptera and Hemiptera section before he moved over to the dark side Taking our Beetles and Bugs Flickr pages as a model the idea developed into something much more ambitious, and we want YOU to help us achieve this on the night!
All you need is to turn up, be able to read and possess a smartphone or tablet — easy! Are you ready? First we take a photo of the specimen which we upload to our Flickr site.
After this a transcription app pulls the image from Flickr, and we ask any willing member of the public to transcribe the image. Once transcribed these data are added to our "Science Uncovered Transcriptions" data set. Then it's up to you to tweet about your good work! You can even do it whilst having a beer! Don't worry if you're concerned about data accuracy, we've thought about that too. Every specimen label will be transcribed multiple times, building up the level of accuracy and we will have our experienced team of digitisers and geo-referencers on hand to answer questions.
After the event the dataset will be cleaned up by Ben, and then Max and Ben will work with the data to prepare it for entry in to our Museum database imagine a database that has to cope with 80 million records! So this is very exciting and a new way of looking at and accessing our collection. The Coleoptera team have already come a long way with digitisation of specimens.
Our beetles and bugs Flickr page has been online since , has had well over a million visits, and has led to an unprecedented rise in interest in our collections as a result.
Not only do we use it to highlight specimens of special note, like this one collected by Alfred Russel Wallace,. Thaumastopeus agni Wallace A. Species was named after the collector, a Mr. Lamb, but Wallace translated his name into Latin.
Each year we receive upwards of 50, specimens into the collection from recent collecting trips such as this beetle collected by me and Max in Borneo in Lepidiota stigma Fabricius, collected in Borneo - a beetle capable of producing the purest form of white colour known to science. Identifying these beetles can be a lengthy process so putting them up online allows a first look for researchers and taxonomists all over the world.
If they see something they think is interesting we can then send those specimens out on loan; eventually they will be returned identified and quite often there will be a few new species too! Darwinilus sedarisi Chatzimanolis, Staphylinidae: Holotype newly described from Charles Darwin's collection held in the Museum.
Hillery Warner beetler and top specimen mounter was one of the pioneers of our Flickr site, and here she explains why we began this most ground-breaking of projects. Sometimes, beetles just aren't enough to keep Hillery busy; she has to dabble in the dark arts of Mantodea too While we did have some success with this, the project quickly evolved into not only a fantastic public outreach outlet, but also a way of maximising the usefulness of our digital loans.
Scientists scattered across the globe need to see specimens in our collection in order to do their work- identifying, describing, and revising life on earth. Sometimes they need to take a really close look at every detail of a specimen, which means they have to fly over to London, which is expensive , or we need to actually put the insects in a box and post them out on loan.
But sometimes they just need "to see it". This is when the very best option is to take a picture and send it. Job done. We call that a "digital loan".
Before the Flickr site, we would email the attachment to the scientist who asked for it, and we were the only people to ever see it. What a waste! These people are working on cool stuff. And you should get to see it, too. So now, we put it out onto Flickr for you too! Since the inception of our Flickr site the Museum has began digitising collections on an even larger scale and now employs a team of people to image and transcribe.
They work on dedicated projects; the most recent one for Coleoptera being the digitisation of specimens of beetles belonging to the family Chrysomelidae the leaf beetles , of which many species are known to be economically important crop pests, as part of the Crop and Pest Wild Relatives Initiative.
A drawer from the Coleoptera collection of members of the leaf beetle genus Diabrotica - all imaged and label data transcribed by the digitiser team. So, we look forward to working with you on the night! Let's see how many specimens we can transcribe… and remember, we need you to help make this a success!
Image taken by artist and photographer in residence to the Coleoptera section, Helena Maratheftis. As fieldwork and collections co-ordinator for the Panama project I had to make sure that any fieldwork we undertook was approved and regulated by the relevant authorities.
In order to fulfil our obligations to the countries and institutions we collaborate with, a permit will be agreed upon setting out the conditions and commitments we must abide by in order to collect insect specimens for scientific research. On our collecting trip to Panama in March and April we were fortunate to have the opportunity to collaborate with the University of Panama , and Panama Wildlife Conservation - without their assistance this project would not have been possible.
Fast-forward four months and today is an exciting day. Finally, after months of tense negotiations with international couriers, many phones calls, texts and emails flying between Panama and the UK, we are finally expecting a very large package of carefully preserved insects…Those long minutes spent on hold to our excellent couriers listening to 'Aint no river wide enough' - on a loop, paid off The very wide and deep river we crossed everyday to get to our field site.
So, this is a backwards way of introducing a major project on beetle genetics and Natural History Museum collections development but most importantly a very big thank you to all the amazing people and organisations that helped us realise this project.
As part of our commitment to collaboration with Panama, it was important to us to exchange expertise and knowledge; essentially capacity build.
Our intention was to collect in the dry and rainy season which meant being in the field for at least 2 months my tolerance for roughing it extends to three weeks maximum! Vayron de Gracia with a fancy lizard photo bomb Julien Haran! A somewhat nervous looking team we are about to leave behind to continue collecting. It was an ideal situation to find two excellent, willing and able biology students from the University of Panama; eager to accompany us on this trip into the darkest interior of Santa Fe National Park to a locality previously never collected for insects before.
We trained them in biological recording techniques and beetle family identification which helped them to put the theory learned on their university course to practical use in the field.
When we left just on the edge of the dry season Vyron and Bernardo stayed on for another five weeks to continue collecting using the methods they had learned from us. Arguably a more sanitary lunch break in the field with one of the project leaders, Eric Flores left foreground. Learning how to process insect samples in the field no sign of lunch!
Here is what they have to say about their experience working on a Natural History Museum fieldwork expedition all good of course! Report on the training of Panamanian field assistants. The collecting of insects developed in the Santa Fe National Park, allowed us for the first time to learn about collecting methods and about the traps used to capture insects in tropical forests.
This was the first time we worked with these type of traps, in understory FIT and Malaise , upper canopy SLAM , on the ground Pitfall and Winkler traps leaf litter ; and the Yellow pan traps at ground level to capture other orders of insects such as Hymenoptera.
As undergraduate biology students at the University in Panama, we have only been taught about trapping for aquatic insects. Another important aspect was the way the traps were deployed on a plot by plot grid system that can be used in any tropical forest anywhere in the world, not just Panama. We did not know about this methodology to capture insects, in summary this was all new knowledge for us. Julien, Bernardo and Vayron light trapping, with fierce competition from the moon!
This is the first Project of its kind in Santa Fe National Park SFNP and it has been an exciting experience to be part of it from the very beginning and to witness how traps need to be deployed - the organization and methodology used in the field with experts from the Natural History Museum. Moreover, the data generated as a result of this study will be new for the SFNP and for Panama regarding the entomological fauna.
When Google maps go wrong - our plot design; co-ordinates for Santa Fe. Now we have the capacity to transfer the information to other people on how to conduct insect collecting and to collaborate with other scientist in the future. It was also valuable to deal with the traps and collecting in the following months after the team from the Natural History Museum departed.
For example, the harsh climatic conditions, some landslides near the path to the plots, and the damage to the SLAM traps. On one day of normal field collection, we left the Isleta camp to empty our traps and we were astonished to find the SLAM traps of Plot 1 had some holes in the sheet, and the plastic pots were perforated see pics. Our first guess was that the guilty guys were crickets and woodpeckers! We were really worried because we were alone in the field and had to solve the problem in situ, after all we were in charge of collecting in the field.
Masking tape was the temporary solution to the damage of the traps and luckily it worked out until the end of the dry season sampling in Santa Fe. Frequently communication was a barrier from the beginning since our level of English was really poor. However there were always funny moments and anecdotes. We'll be revealing specimens from our scientific collections hitherto never seen by the public before!
So, as converts, you may be coming back to see and learn some more about this most speciose and diverse of organisms or you may be a Science Uncovered virgin and no doubt will be heading straight to the beetles found in the DCII Cocoon Atrium at the Forests Station.
This year the Coleoptera team will be displaying a variety of specimens, from the weird and wonderful to the beetles we simply cannot live without! I have spent almost a year of my life in field camps in various countries and continents, and have generally come back with thousands of specimens, including new species, for the collections of the Natural History Museum. I will explain how we preserve and mount specimens, and how collections we make today differ from those made by previous generations.
Crocker Range, Borneo - it's really hard work in the field The Museum encourages its staff to be respectful of and fully integrate with local cultures whilst on fieldwork. Here is Max demonstrating seemless cultural awareness by wearing a Llama print sweater in Peru. Lydia Smith and Lucia Chmurova, Specimen Mounters and trainee acrobats As part of the forest section at Science Uncovered this year we are going to have a table centred on the diversity of life that you may see and hear in tropical forests.
Scientists at the Natural History Museum are regularly venturing out to remote locations around the world in search of new specimens for its ever expanding collection. What is effect of eliminating beetle from food web? What insects procure their food with their proboscis? Why does the plant fulfill a need for the beetle? What is the favorite food for a ladybird beetle? How does a dumb beetle obtain food?
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Debbie Hadley. Entomology Expert. Debbie Hadley is a science educator with 25 years of experience who has written on science topics for over a decade. Updated March 08, Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Hadley, Debbie. Your Privacy Rights.
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