With over two and a half million specimens deposited in the Manchester Museum’s Entomology Department, ongoing re-curating and documenting these collections constitute a significant part of the wok undertaken by the Curator and his colleagues. Such huge insect collections also present lots of opportunities for students to volunteer in the Museum and to help out museum staff with the documentation and re-organisation of its insect collections.
Louis Nicolls extracting information from data labels of the Manchester Museum’s mantis collection.
Below is a short report prepared by one of the Museum’s volunteers, Louis Nicolls (see above), a second-year undergraduate student from the Manchester Metropolitan University whose passion is mantises (Mantodea):
“I am currently working on the mantis collection at the Manchester Museum. The work I’m tasked with consists of the extraction of any information from the museum’s archives, collection and annual reports with the aim to collate it all into one succinct report describing the history of the mantis collection, including the first accessions and the collectors who’ve donated the specimens. The report will also provide statistics on the collection, stating its size, the number of species and the percentage of the world’s species we have at the Museum. It will highlight interesting species and any type specimens. Behind the scenes, I will also be updating all the relevant information within the museum database on locality, date and collector information.
This project is exciting because I have been learning a great deal about praying mantises. it’s allowing me to better understand their distribution, taxonomy and history from a systematic context. The project is also providing excellent experience with museum entomological collections, pushing me to learn how they are organised and run as well as how fundamentally important they are within the sciences but also to the general public. The nature of the work is a balanced melding of historical research and scientific study making it stimulating and informative as it pushes me to use initiative and apply myself in ways I wouldn’t normally do so.”
Example of the drawer with mantises from the collection of Manchester Museum.
Further reading:
Logunov, D.V. 2010. The Manchester Museum’s Entomology Collections. – Antenna, 34(4): 163-167.
Logunov, D.V. & N. Merriman (eds). 2012. The Manchester Museum: Window to the World. London: Third Millenium.
Logunov, D.V. 2012. Why do museums have natural history collections? – Feedback, the ASAB education newsletter, 52: 12-15.
Entomology Manchester 