TEXAS A&M MUSEUM A GOLD MINE OF INFORMATION

COLLEGE STATION –- To most folks, dried insects are something to be swept out of corners. To John Oswald and Ed Riley, they’re a gold mine.

Oswald and Riley oversee the more than 2.5 million preserved insects and other arthropod species in the Texas A&M University entomology department’s insect collection.

“It is by far the largest (insect collection) in Texas,” said Oswald, museum curator. “To the best of our knowledge, it is really the largest entomological research collection between California and Florida and south of Kansas.”

Most of the specimens – whether dried, in alcohol, or mounted on slides – come from Texas, the surrounding states and Mexico. However, species have been collected or donated from many other countries as well.

The collection began about 100 years ago when the department of entomology was formed, although some of its specimens date back to the late-1800s.

The museum has been expanded by donated specimens, including a butterfly and moth collection from Roy Kendall of San Antonio. Kendall is a serious amateur collector who spent about 40 years gathering about 100,000 butterfly and moth specimens from Texas and other states, Oswald said.

“Kendall’s is a very important collection scientifically,” Oswald said, “not only for the adult butterflies it contains, but also because Roy was very interested in biology. Instead of just collecting adults, he would also obtain eggs and larvae,” and raise butterflies from them, resulting in new information about their biology.

His collection also has more than 20,000 pages of notes on the butterfly and moth biology, including much information about species’ food plant preferences.

Kendall has been sending the collection in one or two lots per year since the early 1990s, so about three-quarters of it are now at Texas A&M. Before he releases it to the university, Kendall makes sure all of the information about each section arrives completed and organized. His collection is well-known among Lepidoptera (butterfly and moth) experts because he published many scientific papers, said Riley, associate curator of the museum.

Texas A&M’s insect collection serves the university in several ways: undergraduate and graduate students can learn about the biology and identification of insects, and researchers at Texas A&M and from around the world can study named and unnamed species of insects.

“The university, first of all, has a teaching function,” Riley said. Undergraduates study the insects in class. Graduate students and Texas Cooperative Extension faculty use insect specimens in outreach programs in public schools and in adult education.

Also, since only about 1 million of the estimated 10 million insects in the world have been described and given formal scientific names, scientists use collections like Texas A&M’s to study those that have been identified and those that have not. The insect collection contains many species that have not yet been described or named.

According to Riley, “We’re in the golden age of discovery,” in terms of identifying and naming species.

“Most collections (in the United States) are happy to have their specimens in the hands of researchers for study,” Oswald said.

The Texas A&M museum sees a constant traffic of loans to researchers, averaging 60 loans and 15,000 specimens per year, he added.

The museum staff also contracts with Extension to identify insects found in Texas crops, gardens, yards and landscapes. The staff identifies insects and supply biological information, formally identifying 200 to 400 species annually and handling hundreds of additional information requests, he said.

The museum also identifies insects for other state and federal agencies, he said.

“We identify not only what it is, but we also provide basic information about its biology and whether it’s invasive,” Oswald said.

The collection and its staff also assist amateurs, many of whom are experts about certain groups of insects and who have an interest in insect collecting, taxonomy and biology.

Insect specimens will last indefinitely if stored properly away from light that can bleach or fade, moisture, and insects that would normally feed on dried insects.

Specimens are wrapped in plastic bags and frozen when they first enter the museum to make sure they don’t bring other infected specimens into the collection, and spot treatments are given with pesticides when infestations are noticed, Oswald explained.

“We really don’t know how long they will last,” Riley said. Some European collections contain specimens that are more than 250 years old.

When added to the Texas A&M collection, specimens are labeled with data on where it was collected (the country, state, county and sometimes global positioning systems coordinates), when collected, the collector’s name, and ecological and habitat information.

“If we’re out collecting, we’ll prioritize what we think ought to go into the collection. Often, this is material not otherwise found in the collection, or material needed for immediate research here or at other universities,” Riley said.

The collection receives a number of small donations from individuals who want to see them saved.

“Occasionally, we have donations that range up to the many thousands of specimens, like the Kendall collection,” he said.

“The A&M collection is now at a point where it’s old enough and stable enough so that people want to donate their collections to us. They know it will receive the proper care and be made available to researchers around the world for study,” Oswald said.

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