The story about the natural history collection at University of Lousiana at Monroe spread quickly. Smithsonian wrote about the threat. A Facebook post by the Museum reporting on the problem was viewed 100,000 times. I wrote it about it on Saturday: Natural history collection told to get out or be destroyed. Museums and universities heard the news and rallied. Today, Science magazine reports the collection has been given a reprieve.
“Dozens and dozens” of other museums and academic institutions had offered to take in the collection’s 3 million to 6 million preserved fish, and some 500,000 plant specimens, says Thomas Sasek, a biology professor who also serves as the botany curator of the university’s natural history museum. As a result, “there’s no longer a danger of destruction,” he says, although the decision about exactly where to send the museum’s collection is still being finalized.
Along with news of the rescue, details about how a natural history collection came to be in conflict with an athletic stadium emerged. In 2012, the 6 million fish and 500,000 plant specimens were in storage while the museum was renovated. A fire damaged a different classroom and the specimens needed to be moved from their storage location to free up classroom space. Because the fish are preserved in alcohol and are flammable, storage conditions must be fire-safe. The university’s stadium has temperature controlled rooms with a sprinkler system and so the collection was moved into the stadium.
This points out, once again, what has priority for building conditions — sports. And now the stadium and surrounding area are slated for more improvements to be suitable for track events.
It is not an unfamiliar story in the museum community, which has seen other collections falter. “It speaks to a broader problem of this country . . . We are not investing in research infrastructure in a coordinated or thoughtful way.”
While the collection is no longer facing eviction and destruction, the need to move it will interrupt a regional collaboration among the museum and other institutions to digitize the collection and make it available online. Curator Sasek has received grants totaling nearly $600,000 from the National Science Foundation for the digitizing project, but 18 months of work remains. The collection needs to be gone from ULM by July, in three months.
The fish and plant specimens are from the region and represent 40 to 50 year careers by the professors and the work of 15,000 biology students. The herbarium collection is larger than all others in Louisiana combined. And yet despite the size and significance of these collections, they were under-used because they weren’t well-known.
While some may see the massive shelves and cabinets packed with pickled fish, flattened flowers and animal bones as an expensive waste of space, such collections serve as the foundation for many fields of research….
Collected specimen are used to monitor the spread of disease and the advance of invasive species. Even agencies like the Department of Defense use them to put together Environmental Impact Statements.
One problem with the ULM collection . . . is that no one in the field knew it even existed. As an ichthyologist, [the collections manager at the University of Kansas] has a fairly strong grasp on the collections around the country—but he’d never even heard about the ULM collection. And size had nothing to do with it. At 100,000 lots ULM's collection is over twice as large as the the one he oversees at KU, which is considered a major collection in the Midwest.
And by not being used enough, funding to maintain the collection falters.
...maintaining the collections requires diligent effort. Jars have to be checked for evaporation and topped off with fluids, and if insects get into plant specimens, the materials have to be frozen and the cabinet fumigated.
"We haven't been very active, as it was in the past, because we don't have faculty that are working on the collection as much. So it's kind of a circular thing that if it doesn't get used then we can't hire anyone to work in that area, and so then it doesn't get used. And it looks like it's not important. That's just the reality all around the country.
With offers from some of the most prestigious organizations in the US, the collections are saved for now. But the drama of this near loss and the highlight on athletics over-riding science represents deeper issues in universities and in education. Research needs more than scientists and study grants. We need collections and suitable storage space, laboratories, instruments, and other infrastructure that isn’t covered in grants. We need academia.