An award has been made to the San Diego Society of Natural History under the direction of Dr. Bradford Hollingsworth to replace tags in the herpetology collection at the San Diego Natural History Museum. This collection is one of the largest of its kind with specimens of lizards, snakes, and amphibians from the western United States and border regions. The current tags with data on collection dates, locations, and other information are in danger of degradation and can cause damage to the specimens stored in alcohol. The new tags of archival, nondamaging materials will standardize the formatting for data and safeguard the information on the tags as well as the specimens themselves. The museum will continue to recruit students, including those from groups underrepresented in science, to help curate and upgrade the tags in the herpetology collection.
Natural history collections serve as the basis for our understanding of the world’s biodiversity. These resources are the foundation for the discovery of new life forms and help reveal how natural processes work. Owing to the complex nature of biodiversity, each collection is organized into specific disciplines to allow experts to better retrieve specimens. The information associated with each specimen, including where and when it was collected and it’s species identity, are tied together by the assignment of an unique catalogue number. Usually this involves tying a numbered tag to each specimen to give it an individual identity. In the Department of Herpetology at the San Diego Natural History Museum (SDNHM), the research collection houses over 76,500 catalogued amphibian and reptile specimens, representing one of the largest collections in the western United States. The collection has significant holdings in the biological diverse regions of California and Baja California and their associated islands. It serves as the basis for research in biodiversity and, more and more, plays a role in the conservation drama that is taking center stage in our region. For example, San Diego County is implementing national models for conservation plans to preserve natural lands and endangered species. The goals of these plans, regional manifestations of California’s Natural Communities Conservation Plans, include the protection of our region's biodiversity and quality of life, while still allowing for economic development. Since our collections define the distributions of amphibians and reptiles in our region, they help determine the effects of urbanization, development and habitat management on the area’s biodiversity. The close inspection and inventory of the amphibian and reptile specimens revealed an urgent need. Numbered specimen tags used in the collection were falling off and degrading. Over 49,900 did not meet the standards to be considered archival tags. These tags are the sole mechanism to associate a specimen to collection information stored in both the written catalogue and electronic database. Twelve types of tags have been used in the collection, dating back to 1891. Of these, eleven types have some form of problem, including three types with critical disassociation concerns. To ensure the integrity of connecting research specimens with their associated data, this project standardized the eleven problematic tag types with an archival tag, matching a currently used type. Newly printed archival tags were individually hand-tied or threaded onto specimens with problematic tags. We hired a full-time project manager to organize, purchase, and manage the activities associated with retying nearly 50,000 specimen tags. The replacement of 2,000 critical tags (types 1, 2, and 5) was completed first by retrieving individual specimens from the collection holdings. The remaining tag replacements proceeded by systematically going through the entire collection (~13,000 jars). Management of the project was straight-forward, as no original tags were removed from the specimens, in order to preserve the historical nature associated with them. Students, volunteers, and staff cut more than 50,000 strings and organized the tags into pre-cut bins of 500 tags each, for easy tag number retrieval. During the process of retagging the collection, there was the opportunity to correct minor spelling errors on jar labels and in the database, as well as, improving the collection’s organization, storage distribution, and access. Over the course of the project, we have trained both high school and college student interns, and involved a team of museum volunteers, representing a diverse cross section of the public. Two undergraduate college interns were hired as part of the Research Experience for Undergraduates program. One has successfully completed her Bachelor’s degree, while the other continues to work in the collection as a part-time technician. In addition to the continued use of the collection by researchers, we have highlighted the importance of natural history collections as a learning resource in major public exhibitions in the museum’s galleries. This project has improved the quality of research by ensuring that the integrity of the information associated with each specimen will be maintained over the long term. In turn, researchers worldwide, will continue to have access to biodiversity information and research specimens, for use in studies of historical biogeography, systematics, functional morphology, ecology, physiology, behavior, ethnozoology, tracking the introduction of exotic species, conservation planning and land use, and GIS distributional modeling.
