Oregon State University Arthropod Collection
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The collection here is
a research collection.
We're often called an insect museum
or an insect collection.
And we are a repository
for biological specimens. A natural history museum,
so to speak, that's been here
at OSU since the 1870s at some point.
It's probably where we were.
Although, the seed of
the collection probably dates back even to the 1860s.
An arthropod, I like to
tell young school kids, it's the
multi-legged organisms
that go "crunch" when you step on them on the sidewalk.
These are the insects, the spiders, the centipedes.
Most of us are acquainted with insects and spiders we
see them on a daily basis. We don't see some of the
less common arthropods
that we might have here in the collection.
Although, we encounter them everyday in our
daily lives, we just don't realize that they're around.
So these are the- These are some of the scarab
beetles that were donated by Bary Sullivan,
a local collector in Salem
who recently gave his entire collection to
the Oregon State Arthropod Collection.
And these are various
genera, mostly the genus Chrysina.
Over the last 130 years
the collection has grown to be a pretty formidable
natural history collection. And
we are the largest insect
collection in the Pacific Northwest and
the largest, if not one of the largest
collections of Pacific Northwest insects
anywhere in the world.
We have about 3 million specimen.
We're not sure exactly how many specimens
that we have in the cabinets that make up
the collection mostly because,
like a lot of analogical collections,
we don't-
the history has been one where we haven't kept track of individual
specimens but rather the species
that make up the collection as a whole.
These natural history museums that
are basically archives of biodiversity,
when and if and should a species
become imperiled or extinct
these natural history museums are sometimes
the best place for scientists and researchers,
or the general public, to
come in and actually see these taxa,
these species, which are incredibly
difficult if not impossible to actually
see in the wild.
And so the specimens
are an insurance policy
that scientists can still obtain new information
about specimens that may no longer exist in the wild.
New advances in technology allow us to do things
that we never could have dreamed of doing in the 1930s,
when some of these specimens were collected.
So we can sequence DNA now out of specimens.
Who knows what we'll know and be able to
do in a 100 years from now, but
if we have specimens that are
maybe extinct in a 100 years, if we have
specimens in museums scientist will be able to apply
those as yet undiscovered technologies
to these new specimens to understand more
about the world, or maybe
even help bring some of these species back.
In the future it's all science fiction.
So we don't know what's going to happen.
But what we do know is that if
we don't have these species archived somewhere
we don't have any chance to apply these new
tools of knowledge.