- Welcome, everyone, to
Wednesday Nite at the Lab.

I'm Tom Zinnen, I work here

at the UW-Madison
Biotechnology Center.

I also work for
Cooperative Extension.

And on behalf of those folks
and our other core organizers,

Wisconsin Public Television,
Wisconsin Alumni Association,

and the UW-Madison
Science Alliance,

thanks again for coming to
Wednesday Nite at the Lab.

We do this every Wednesday
night, 50 times a year.

Tonight it's my pleasure to
introduce to you Dan Young

of the Department of Entomology.

He'll be here to talk about
the insect research collection

here at the UW,
the Department of Entomology.

It's a pretty amazing
thing to be able to collect,

whether it's
plants or minerals

or insects in this case.

And I think one of the cool
things in talking to Dan

was their collection dates
back almost 170 years

and almost 3 million specimens.

And that's a lot of bugs.

But it's also a lot of heritage,

and it grows year
by year by year.

I'm looking forward to
hearing what Dan has to say

about the Wisconsin
Insect Research Collection

here at the University
of Wisconsin.

Please join me in
welcoming Dan Young

back to
Wednesday Nite at the Lab.

(applause)

- Thanks, Tom, and thanks
you all for coming.

Undoubtedly, this is going to be

an insanely stimulating
presentation,

and you're going to have
a million questions.

I hope you brought paper
to write them down,

because they've told me
I'm not supposed to be

entertaining questions
until the end.

Hopefully, you'll
have questions,

but if you can, save
them till the end.

So in Tom's prelude,

he actually
mentioned a couple of,

or tiptoed around, a couple
of other collections

that are on campus.

And so before I get started
with our collection,

who can tell me the other
natural history collections

that are here on campus?

We have some amazing, amazing
natural history collections.

So there's entomology,

primary, first and foremost.

What?

Botany?

The State Herbarium, right?

The Wisconsin State Herbarium,
that's like saying Ohio State.

You have to put
"the" in front of it.

So the State of Wisconsin
Herbarium, right?

- [Audience Member] Geology.

- Geology. What? Zoology.

You've got four of them.

In one of the talks coming up,
you mentioned something about

in September or October?

- [Audience Member]
Anthropology.

Anthropology, those are
our five natural history

collections on campus.

And those form a consortium.

The UW Natural History
Museum's council,

for which I serve as co-chair,

and some of you are
familiar, perhaps,

with the UW2020 project,

and our consortium did
receive one of those grants

a year or so ago

to try to develop a
portal, a digital portal,

to better integrate
our collections

so that you could ask the--

You could put in a
query and find out

what particular species
of beetle might be found

on which particular
species of plant

at what particular
part of the state

with the phenology of flowering

at what particular
time of the year,

so all those data
exist disparately

in all these collections,

and this is an attempt to
try to bring those together.

These kinds of things
are going on nationally and
internationally, as well.

But we were very
fortunate to be able to

bring our collections
here on campus together,

at least remotely,
to do that, as well.

But largely what I'm here
to talk to you tonight

is about our UW Insect
Research Collection.

So here we are at the door.
Welcome.

And we're going to open
the door and let you in.

This is about the best way
we can do it right now,

because if you read what
Tom head sent out to you,

our building is under--

Well, they call it construction,

but it's mostly
been destruction.

So hopefully, at some point,

some of you might be able
to manage to get ahold of
us and get a tour.

We are largely a
research collection.

We are not so much a museum.

So if you were to go
to the geology museum,

they're a museum.

And they have a lot of space
that's devoted to displays.

That is one of the ways
that I differentiate

between a museum
and a collection.

A museum would tend to have a
lot of public display areas,

like the Milwaukee Public
Museum, a favorite of ours.

We are largely a
research collection,

so once you enter into the
bowels of the collection,

it's not going to
look real exciting

unless you get real excited
about steel and metal cabinets.

But when you come
into our main range

here on the third
floor of Russell Labs,

you're going to go
about halfway there,

and then the next shot is
going to be panning down

to the right, where we see
those beautiful, wonderful

steel cabinets, each of
which contains thousands

upon thousands upon
thousands of specimens

that are all arranged
hierarchically

so that we can get
at them very quickly.

So I'm going to go through six
major topical areas with you

that relate to our collection.

And we're going to
start with history.

As Tom mentioned, a
collection our age

does have a pretty
good amount of history

associated with it.

So the collection, 170
might be a little bit,

a little bit on the hefty side,

but we know that although
records weren't kept

as well as we might've archived,

but we know that from around
1900, certainly around 1909,

there were beginnings
of a collection

that were starting to
assemble themselves.

This became a little
bit more formalized

in the early 1950s down
in good old King Hall.

At the time the collection
became something

that you would recognize as
a single standing collection,

the collection was sort
of housed and kept by

whoever was teaching the
insect identification
course at that time.

That was one of the
responsibilities that they had,

to upkeep that collection,
which was pretty doable,

because it was
relatively small then.

So early on, growth was about
a half a dozen cabinets,

and if you remember looking
down that long aisle,

each of those long aisles is
divided into smaller aisles,

so we have several
hundred cabinets now.

And we have also two facilities.

I'll get into that
in a little bit.

So early growth, about
a half a dozen cabinets,

and each cabinet
would hold 24 drawers,

our standard insect drawers,

and these came largely
from donations by faculty,

by their research projects,
some students that would donate

as a part of what they
were doing with their
own collections.

Again, if you read Tom's
little preamble tonight,

he talked about a
collection that he made

down in Platteville, wasn't it?

Yeah.

And donations from amateurs.

We do get a lot of really
substantive donations

from amateurs, just like people
that are bird enthusiasts

or whatever enthusiasts,

they tend to know a
lot about the subject,

and when they decide
they no longer

are able to keep
their collection,

of if they happen to die,
and there's a relative

that's thoughtful
enough to remember

that these are incredibly
valuable things,

they may contact us or
other collections around,

and we try to do a rescue of
those kinds of collections.

So as would not be uncommon,

early efforts from our
collection emphasize Coleoptera,

those are the beetles.

How many of you who
work on beetles?

Hi, Jackie.
(laughter)

So more than one out of four
of every kind of living species

on the planet is a beetle.

So what worthless things
are you working on?

(laughter)

Yeah, so beetles,
it's understandable

that would be a major emphasis,
because there so many of them.

Diptera, the flies.

Flies, of course, have
a lot of nuisance value

with mosquitoes and black flies

and no-see-ums and deer flies,

but flies have some of
the most crazy, bizarre,

incredibly interesting biologies
of anything on the planet,

so there's a lot of
interesting flies, and
we'll get back to that.

It's one of our main
sub-stories, our sub-plots.

And, of course, the
god-awful Lepidoptera.

So, let's see,
this would be like,

so it would be like the Packers

and the Vikings
thing, kind of, right?

So if you work on
beetles, then Lepidoptera,

which are the
butterflies and moths

are just absolutely disgusting.

But they are, like
Coleoptera and Diptera,

three of the largest
orders of insects.

So definitely there'd
be a lot of people

that would be working on
those, hobbyists and whatnot.

Some of the folks that I've
followed in the footsteps,

Charles Fluke.

It says in the archives that
he was director of the WIRC,

the Wisconsin Insect Research
Collection from 1916 to 1958.

I'm thinking maybe
that's when he lived.

That's a lot of years.

I'd have to work like 20 more
years to catch up to that.

Maybe, maybe.

Fluke was a fly specialist.

And again, he will come back
to us as one of our sub-plots,

because the group
that he specialized on

turns out to be
a family of flies

for which our collection
is one of the best

in the entire world.

Roy Shenefelt,
from 1958 to 1977,

a little bit before I got here.

Roy was more of a bibliographer
than really a taxonomist.

Nominally, he worked on wasps,

but a lot of what he liked to
do was just collect reprints

and organize bibliographic
kinds of materials,

write catalogs of
species and things like.

Jane Harrington was
there from '77 to '91.

I did overlap with Jane.

She was a Hemepterist,
so the true bugs.

She worked on Lygaeoids,
so, let's see,

like in a couple of weeks
when, well, a few weeks, maybe,

when the milkweed
pods begin to dehisce.

In fact, I've already
seen some already.

You'll see a black and orange
bug that really is a bug.

That is its scientific name.

The order Hemeptera are
the bugs, the true bugs.

So you'll begin to see
Lygaeus on milkweed,

a couple of different
groups of them.

And she didn't work on
that particular one,

but she actually worked
on some weird ones

that were blood-feeders
in the tropics.

And then this dude showed up

and has been a
director since 1991.

My position's a wee bit odd,
not only for the department,

but or the college and maybe
even for the university.

My appointment is
largely teaching.

My appointment, as you spread
it out, is 75% teaching,

20% research, and they've
allowed me to use a nominal 5%

to serve as the director
of the collection,

and I listed a couple
of groups there

that I do most of
my research with.

Ironically, we've
managed to have

the same number of curators.

So the director in our
particular situation

oversees the general
planning and brainstorming

of where the collection
is and where it's headed,

tries desperately,
usually unsuccessfully,

to find money to
keep things going,

and works very closely
with the curator.

The curator is the person that
you'd be likely to find there

on a day-to-day basis making
all those plans happen.

So Lutz Bayer was
there from '68 to '73,

John Baker, '73 to '78,
both fairly short-tenured,

Steve Krauth the
opposite, 1978 to 2013,

now an emeritus curator and
still lives up in my lab,

comes in pretty much every day.

And then our current curator
is Dr. Craig Brabant,

who was actually
a student of mine.

He was interim right
when Steve retired.

Literally the day the
position vacancy announcement

was set forth was the same
exact day that the university

put a hiring freeze on.

So Craig was sort of
interim for two years,

and we were able to
get that position back

with a lot of clawing
and struggling.

So since 2015 he's
been full-time curator.

He works on wasps.

The group that he works on
is the family Mutillidae,

which are the velvet ants.

Craig and his significant
other just got back

from a conference,
an international
conference in Japan

Sunday, Saturday,
Sunday, Monday.

Some of the associates, and I'm
not going to be able to mention

nearly all of them, but
some of our primary ones,

Byron Buckley is actually
a retired veterinarian

that lives out in Deerfield.

He does a lot of preparation,
is also an amateur Coleopterist,

so he's helped me a lot with
moving some of my material
that I've collected

into a stage where it can
actually be identified,

mounted, labeled,
and identified.

Jeff Gruber, so Jeff
Gruber started out

as a master's student with me
working on a group of beetles,

and just couldn't
quite get to the point

where he wanted to
actually get serious enough

to do the research
and do the publishing.

But he's an insane collector.

He's the guy that you
either would definitely

want to go fishing with,

or you would never want to
be in the same boat with,

'cause if you show
it to him and say,

I want some of these, he will
find them no matter what it is,

if it's a beetle, a fly,
a wasp, or anything.

He's got the only
one of umpteen things

that are in our collection.

Jeff has also done a lot more
these days with photography,

which he's taken up, which
is a lot easier to manage

than collecting and
killing and pinning

and mounting and
labeling, I guess.

Kyle Johnson, another
former student of mine,

just got back from
Canada and Alaska

and works on largely alpine

and also bog-related
butterflies.

Current student Ann Marsh
works on a group of beetles,

a sub-family of, Staphylinoidea.

So Coleoptera, the
largest family,

I mean the largest order
of anything on the planet.

The largest family within that
order is the Staphylinoidea.

These are the rove beetles.

And when Ann said she wanted
to work on rove beetles,

I said, no way.

There's like 65,000
species of these things.

You're not going to work
on those for a master's.

But we did find one sub-family,
and the Tachyporines,

which actually there's a
pretty good literature on,

because a Canadian worked
on them quite a bit.

So she's working on a
faunistic survey of the state

to give us a better
idea, a better baseline

of what's here in Wisconsin.

Another former student is
an undergrad, Robert Otto,

didn't do any graduate
work here, but he's
probably published more

than any of my grad students,
probably all of them combined.

He works on a relatively
modest-sized family of beetles

that look a lot like click
beetles, but aren't.

Keri Steiger, another one
of my former students,

worked on a group
of longhorn beetles.

Jackie Wisnat, that's
one, two, three,

four, five, six, or
seven rows back there,

my newest student,
and she will be

getting really, really, really
serious with a proposal,

and she's going to
be working, like Ann,

a faunistic survey of
the family Tetratomidae,

relatively small
family of beetles,

again, with a pretty
good literature base.

These are fungus feeders,

and Jackie's fresh off
from a good fungus course

that we had here last semester,

so she'll be able to
make a nice marriage

between her knowledge of
fungi and the beetles.

And then lastly, Andrew
Williams, on my list.

Andrew is an honorary fellow.

He's sort of a prairie
insect enthusiast.

Housing, so we moved into
Russell Labs in 1963,

so I guess it was destined
to have some remodeling done.

Our space on the third floor
occupies 1,141 square feet.

Now, I put in here that
approximately 830 square feet

has been allocated to the
actual cabinetry footprint.

That's actually probably
a little bit larger now.

I didn't go back
and remeasure it.

But Craig, Dr. Brabant's
been very, very good

at squishing space, which
is something we very much

always need around here.

Who decided that building
a capitol on an isthmus

was a great idea,

and then putting a
massive university there?

Anyway.

So we have always been
struggling for space

to accommodate our growth,

because we are not a
static collection at all.

We grow very, very consistently
throughout the years,

especially since
I've been director,

because we have a
lot of students,

we have a lot of work going on,

and we're not just a dust
ball sort of a collection.

So in addition to our
space that we have here,

we've got a small storage
space in the basement,

which is largely where we keep

collecting gear and
things like that,

a very small storage space
out at the West Madison Farms

in one of the outbuildings.

On the first floor right now

between the two teaching
labs that we have,

there's a little
lab where we have

one of our imaging
systems that we use

for taking good pictures.

But we've updated that,

and we now have
another imaging system

up in the main
collection, as well,

which we'll peek
at here briefly.

So yeah, we have dedicated space

by the department and college
as a collecting facility.

We have a space, and again,
I'll show you some pictures

of these things, where we
could house a few researchers.

Sometimes these are
undergraduates or
graduate students

that are volunteering, sometimes
they're visiting scientists

that spend some time with us.

And we also have an
office for the curator,

a small library of
some of our resources.

Steenbock, of course, is right
next door, so that's handy,

and every third thing
these days is digitized,

so that makes it
pretty handy too,

and then that imaging
facility that I'll show you.

So our major holdings now
are a whole bunch of names

that won't mean anything to you,

but suffice to say, we have
a lot of additional areas

that we have expanded to
accommodate now, as well.

I'm one floor up, my office
and my suite of offices

and labs space where
my grad students are

is one floor up in
the fourth floor.

So in addition to our space
that we have in Russell,

as I said, over the years,
we did all that we could.

I think most of my floor
burns from my knees are gone

from begging the
college for more space,

but there was, in
the stock pavilion,

which is still a stock
pavilion, there is a third floor

that had become, basically,

a warehouse for things that
people didn't want anymore.

Yeah, there's that
place in Hogwarts kind
of like that, right?

So we were able--
Well, one of the deans

walked me over and said,
you know, do you have a vision?

(laughter)

Well, I'm not that tall, so
seeing over all this stuff

was the first problem,
but that is the space.

We were able to get a couple
of different pools of money,

and the college and some of
the other departments around

were very helpful to us,

and physical plant
was helpful, as well.

Basically, we were able
to clean out that space,

remodel the third floor
of the stock pavilion,

and this is what
you see right now

It functionally opened in 2010.

Compared to the other side,
to the Russell Lab facility,

this looks a whole lot more
jumbled up, because it is.

It's a vastly larger space.

It quadruples our
potential footprint.

But it also houses, pretty
much all the cabinetry

and boxes that you
see there are all

those disgusting Lepidoptera,

which is the last
major group of insects

that we have to
reorganize, to re-catalog,

to reclassify, and so
that's our major task

that basically is
underway right now.

There's also back this way
a room that we will dedicate

to a reference room that'll
have a little bit more sizable

library and reprints and
things of that nature,

a place for people to study.

And again, what we did was
we divided that room so that

the massive order of insects
that's over in the annex,

which we typically
refer to that space

in the stock pavilion,
houses the Lepidoptera,

you know, butterflies and moths.

There are micros that
you can hardly see.

But a lot of butterflies
and moths are grossly large,

for insects, small for mammals,
but large for insects,

and they take up a lot of room.

So in order to build
that collection,

we have to have a lot
of space available.

We had the potential of
acquiring one of the best

collections of hummingbird
moths in the state,

and we had to turn it
down, because we didn't
have room for it.

That was some years ago,
and it went to the
Milwaukee Public Museum.

But we're now in a
much better shape

to take on new collections,
but at any rate,

the real, real large
order of insects

that's over in the annex is
the Lepidoptera,
butterflies and moths.

But also, we acquired,
when he retired,

the Hilsenhoff aquatic
insect collection.

This is a massive collection
of aquatic insects,

almost entirely from Wisconsin.

Bill Hilsenhoff spent
his whole career here,

his undergraduate, his
graduate, his faculty time

all was at the UW-Madison.

When he retired, I
took over his space,

so 445 were his digs eons ago.

And literally, if it rained
hard and there was a mud puddle,

he probably collected there.

If it was aquatic, he
probably collected there.

Anywhere in the state
there's probably been stuff

that Hilsenhoff collected.

So those are largely
research spaces.

In addition to that,
it's under our purview

to also maintain and manage
our instructional collections,

our teaching collections.

So our teaching laboratories
are rooms 147 and 153

in Russell Labs, and this
is a shot just looking

at the entryway to 153, where
a few of our cabinets are

that house our
teaching collections

that support our
introductory entomology,

our taxonomy courses, our
medical entomology course,

economic entomology,
courses where we're
going to use specimens

with students to help teach.

So that's about equivalent
of 15 24-drawer cabinets.

Some of our outreach
materials are also,

when we go out to
schools and whatnot.

So taxonomic scope
and strengths,

as was noted, we have probably
over 3 million specimens now.

I challenge any of you

to dispute the number.

(laughter)

But we have probably
almost double that,

probably over, in excess
of 5 million specimens

that are what we
call bulk specimens.

So when we go out and
collect, typically,

I mean, you probably
can think of, you know,

the crazy dude with Coke
bottle glasses on, and
the white lab coat,

stumbling through the
meadows with a net.

That would be Kyle.

He would kind of
do that probably.

But most of us don't
collect that way.

Most of us use fairly
large trapping systems

that actively or
passively trap insects

that are coming through.

So when we do that,
you accumulate

massive amounts of material,

and so a jar, a single jar
from a single week's collection

may have thousands of specimens,

and they're way too
good to throw away,

even though you're probably
only looking, really,

for one or two
things in that jar.

So everything else gets
bulked into ethyl alcohol,

where it waits for the next
person to be interested in it

or to do some more sorting
of it and things like that.

So that is a massive backlog
that we will always have.

So as I said, our historical
and current strengths,

Coleoptera and Lepidoptera,

I mentioned also the wasps,

the bees and wasps
of the Hymenoptera.

Wasps get a lot of attention
in relatively recent days,

because a lot of
them are parasitoids

of economically
significant insects,

so they're the good guys,

and so people need to know
what in the world they are

in order to study their biology,

so understanding
the taxonomy of them

is incredibly important,

so that you put this
parasitoid together

with this particular
group of problems

and can figure out
what's going on.

Also, even more recently,
the pollinators,

the bees and some of the wasps
are incredibly important,

significant, and much maligned

by the way we've been
treating the planet.

So interest has
really, really swelled

with what do we have out there

in the way of native pollinators

and also those vagabond
pollinators like the honey bee,

which, of course, is not
native to the US at all.

Diptera, by virtue of the
fact they're just so cool,

if I didn't work on beetles,
I'd probably work on flies,

but also the medical
significance is massive.

And we have a brand new,
highly-funded center

for study of, particularly
blood-feeding Diptera,

mosquitoes and so on,
and ticks as well,

which aren't insects, but--

So all of that...

Yeah, all of that

and again, 21,000 specimens
per year in recent years,

that's a dorky average.

I mean, look at the
jars, take a cubic inch,

and extrapolate it, and
it's a silly number,

it's not a real number,

but it's mainly
meant to tell you

that it's a very
active collection,

that there certainly are a
number of collections out there

that are basically mothballed.

They're cared for,
but they don't grow.

They're relatively stagnant.

Ours is definitely not that.

So some of our
noteworthy holdings,

as I mentioned, our first
director, Charles Fluke,

he was a specialist on
that group of flies,

the syrphid flies, hover
flies, or flower flies,

because you usually
find them in flowers.

No, that's not a
wasp, that's a fly.

They tend to very
commonly mimic wasps.

And if you really get to the
point you know the difference,
you can show off.

You can go out there
and grab with your hand,

and if you're with somebody,
they'll be freaking out

that you're trying to collect
a wasp with your hand.

Make sure you get
pretty good at it.

(laughter)

It's a little embarrassing when
you suddenly get stung, but--

This one particular
family of flies,

we have over 16,000
specimens in our collection,

and as I said, it's
probably just about the best

in North America, probably even
better than the Smithsonian,

and one of the
best in the world.

In fact, one of the
syrphid specialists

who retired from the Smithsonian

commonly would be
asking us for stuff.

The Marshall Collection, I
haven't been able to find out

just a whole lot about Marshall.

He was a faculty member
in the zoology department,

and a lot of the nucleus of
our collection came from him,

and also from his bandying
back and forth with other folks.

A lot of collectors will trade
material with other people.

I got some cool
stuff from Wisconsin,

you got some cool stuff
from Missouri, why don't
we switch stuff,

and we'll get more
species and so on.

So the nucleus of our
collection is probably

largely from Marshall.

There aren't too many insect
drawers in our collection

that you can open up without
finding Marshall's name

popping up here and there.

Gene DeFoliart was a
medical entomologist

and on-and-off chair
of the department

a couple of different times.

He worked largely on mosquitoes,
so Culicidae, mosquitoes.

We've got a fairly
substantial collection

of wet and dry
alcohol-preserved slide-mounted

Chloropidae, you know
those little gnats

that just like to
hang around your eyes,

sort of eye-gnat things?

Those are chloropids, and
there actually are a few

in the tropics that will
transmit some pathogens.

None of ours do, but
they still bother you.

And he also, and I
didn't really know this

until a little
bit more recently,

but he started out like
a lot of entomologists,

as a stupid Lepidopterist.

And he actually did
a lot of his work

as a student in Wyoming
and actually published

a paper on the
butterflies of Wyoming.

And when he died, his daughter
contacted us and said,

you know, my dad had
all these cabinets.

I said, yeah, I remember
seeing them at the house.

You couldn't miss them. You even
like almost stumbled over them.

He was very proud of them.

And I thought they all
had mosquitoes in them,

but they were large, and
they had a massive number

of these specimens that are
historically very significant

because of the age and the
fact that a lot of these places

are now corn.

So we acquired that collection

of more than 5,000
specimens of butterflies.

Bob Dick was also, he
was largely, I guess,

it's hard to pin some
of these folks down,

but he was largely
a morphologist.

He put together a
ginormous manuscript

on morphology of insects,
never published it.

But he also did a lot
of work on mosquitoes.

So we have approximately
14,000 mounted

and 6,000 slides of
mosquitoes from him.

There was a worker named Dennis
that actually was at Whitewater.

He was a faculty
member at Whitewater,

and he collected tree hoppers.

The little guys you see,
image there, are tree hoppers.

They're in the order Hemeptera.

And we have a large number,
roughly 10,000 specimens

that came to us from Whitewater.

I mentioned the
Hilsenhoff collection,

almost 200,000 specimens,
aquatic insects,

and again, mostly
Wisconsin material.

Walt Suter was faculty
member at Kenosha College,

and we ended up getting a
fair amount of his stuff,

some went elsewhere, but
we have about 24 drawers

of material that
Suter collected.

Towards the end of his lifetime,
he did a lot of survey work

up in Waushara County, and
we got an extensive amount

of material from him.

Another one of
these enthusiasts,

just sort of came out of
the blue, Gary Lachmund,

he was in New York, and
he contacted us and said,

you know, I have some
heartstrings in Wisconsin,

grew up in
southeastern Wisconsin,

so his collection of almost
700 specimens of one genus

of moths came to us, and that
is historically significant,

because most of those
localities don't exist anymore.

And what few do, probably
won't before long.

There are two workers
that are revising,

that are taxonomically
revising this group,

this genus of moths,

and they have spent weeks
and weeks and weeks here

on and off, studying
his material

and are anxious
to get back again,

once we get our imaging system
back up and running again,

but again, one of these
extremely valuable collections.

I have on and off
throughout the years,

just a few thousand
at a time each year,

donated my beetle collection,

which is more than
200,000 specimens,

just sort of shove a little
bit more towards the collection

each year, and ultimately
will be giving most of it
to the collection.

The groups that I primarily
do my research on,

I'm not sure what I'm
going to do with those.

Some may come here, but the two
centers for taxonomic research

in the group that
I work on primarily

are in London and Paris.

Paris's collection is a mess,
even though it's probably

one of the largest
ones in the world.

So I'm probably going to
donate a lot of that stuff

to the Natural History
Museum in London,

which is not the British Museum.

Rosetta Stone, not bugs.
(Laughter)

Natural History Museum, bugs.

Down the road from Harrods,
Cromwell Road, bugs.

(Laughter)

I don't remember the year.

Wasn't that long ago,
out of the blue, again,

St. Joseph College, which
is in Rensselaer, Indiana,

decided that, A, they
didn't want to keep

their collection anymore,
and then shortly after that,

they decided they weren't going
to be a university anymore,

so we were able to grab up

the St. Joseph College
of Lepidoptera,

which is about 40
drawers of Lepidoptera,

largely from Indiana,

but also some worldwide
stuff, as well.

So scope...

bearing in mind the good
old tri-part admission

of a land grant university,
we serve primarily,

I mean, we are
largely to serve you,

the people of Wisconsin.

So our strength is
largely Wisconsin.

There's no other place that
has more Wisconsin insects

than our collection.

There's really no other
definitive research collection

with a primary focus of
research in the entire state.

The only one that would
come close would be

the Milwaukee Public Museum,

and even that is only
largely due to the fact

that the most recent hire
is very much interested

in promoting the profile
of the research program,

stuff that you would
never see if you go

to the Milwaukee Public Museum,

because it's all
behind the scenes,

but a very important
collection, as well.

But in addition, our
secondary area of strength

would be the Great Lakes region.

I did a lot of my
work in Michigan,

and all of that
stuff is coming here

through dribs and drabs.

We have a large number
of folks that are working

in Minnesota, in
Manitoba, in Illinois,
so we get a lot of that.

So the Great Lakes is
certainly a strength of ours,

and particularly the
Western Great Lakes.

And then a tertiary
strength would be worldwide.

We do have material
from all over the world.

In fact, when my
curator just came back

from his little
meeting in Japan,

he brought me three specimens
of the group that I work on.

I was very happy about that.

So digitization, this is
the drop-word these days

in what we do in all
of natural history,

not only insects, but
pretty much everything.

I'm going to be heading
to New Zealand in 10 days,

and every other paper's going
to be about digitization.

It gets to be incredibly
technical and kind of boring,

because I like to look
at bugs and real things.

But it is where a lot of

the bang for the
buck is these days.

This is that 2020
grant that I mentioned.

So in the lower
image, you will see

a shot of our digitizing
room, our imaging room.

So we have robotic system,
which is shown here.

This came to us as part
of a grant that we had

that ran out a
couple of years ago.

But this was meant, the idea,

which didn't turn
out all that grand,

but the idea was to be able
to image entire drawers

of insects at one time.

So that drawer that you
see with all those insects

was imaged at one time.

The whole thing was
done at one time.

And then you can pan up on
that and get pretty good

images of each of those
individual specimens.

Trying to take individual images

of more than 3 million specimens

with 21,000 coming in new each
year is simply impossible.

You will never even come close
to catching up or keeping up.

So this was an idea that we had

with a number of other
collections around the country

that said, let's try this.

Let's work with some
computer engineers.

These were folks down at the
Illinois Natural History survey.

And they came up with
after four or five designs

this robot system
for imaging drawers.

And Jackie's one of our
resident specialists in imaging.

We also have a system back here,

if you can see
where I'm pointing,

that's a really,
really nice SLR camera

on a rail system so you
can take sort of external

CAT scans of insects, and
then compile all of those

images together to get
extremely high resolution

compacted pictures of insects,
which is pretty cool, too.

So our digitization
efforts are twofold.

One would be, what does
that specimen look like

in some detail, but
secondly the data,

the data that are
associated with that.

I say and I tell
my students this

in Introductory
Entomology, a specimen,

whether it's an insect
or a herbarium specimen

or a mineral or an artifact
from an Indian mound,

those specimens have
value to science

from two rather disparate,

but yet totally
united points of view.

One is the specimen itself.

What's its anatomy?
What's its morphology?

What are those
things hanging out?

Secondly, however, are the data.

The data are
incredibly important.

Without the data, all you
have is a pretty specimen.

It has artistic value, it
may have some personal value,

but scientifically,
it has no value.

There's no value at all.
Specimens come to us,

they could be the coolest
looking things in the world,

from some crazy
part of the world,

but if they don't have data,
they're worthless to us.

We would put them in
our outreach collection.

We'd put them in our
teaching collection.

We'd say, go show
those to some kids,

and they'll be thrilled,

and then they'll break them,
and we'll throw them away,

because they have no
value without the data,

because it's the data that
we pull from those specimens

that tell us what we know
about the state of the world.

How things are changing.

How things have evolved.

How things are similar.
How things are different.

How phenology is changing.

The date, the place,
the time, the events,

all of those things tell us,

they paint a massive picture
about what's going on.

So we digitize those pieces
of information, as well.

So some of these
words you might know,

others you certainly won't.

BIOTA was an early developed
digitization software program.

It was originally developed
as part of a faunistic study,

a long-term faunistic
study in Costa Rica

that was largely butterflies
and then plants,

and then it was made
more widely available.

We started out trying to
do our efforts with that.

It sort of fell off
the face of the earth.

Some of you are
familiar with FileMaker.

You can put together folders

and make databases
with FileMaker.

Excel spreadsheets
a lot of people use.

More recently, we've sort of
flipped the coin and said,

"You know what we're going
to do is we're going to go
with this new thing."

Well, new as in 20 years
old, called Specify.

It was an NSF-supported
product that came out of Kansas

and has been updated,
updated, updated all the time.

So we and most of the other

naturalistic
collections on campus

use that as a database,
as a relational database

to dump all of our
information into.

And then that information,
so that crazy old label there

from, what is it, 1931 it
looks like, May 24th, 1931,

at 4,700 feet in the Cameron
Highlands of Malaysia.

All of that information
gets entered,

and then it becomes
relationally available

to anybody around the world.

And we would find, yeah,
there's similar specimens

like that in Indonesia,
Malaysia, and then in London,

and wow, all of those
came from the same series

that was collected by frickin'
Pendlebury back in 1931.

We didn't even know that.

So we can reassemble all of
those disparate collections,

and then we can get
a better picture

of what things were like in
the good old Cameron Highlands

before it became mostly tea...

and palm oil.

Okay.

So, when we enter those data

and get the relationally
available, digitized,

we then can export those to
other places around the world,

and there's an exporting
product called SCAN

that we're beginning to use,

and again, as I mentioned,
we are also a participant,

along with most of the
other collections on campus,

except for anthropology,
in this 2020 initiative.

So some of the things that
we've been involved with

and are involved with.

We were co-PI on an NSF-TCN.
They love acronyms.

So that's a thematic
collection network.

Should be TCN, not TNC.

TCN, Thematic
Collection Network.

So what that means
is you have a theme,

let's try to robotically
digitize our collections

by doing whole drawer
images, that's the theme,

and you get a bunch of
collections together,
all over the country,

all over the world, that say
yeah, we want to do that.

And you write a proposal, and
then it doesn't get accepted,

and then you rewrite it, and
then it doesn't get accepted,

and then you rewrite it a
third time, and then maybe
it gets accepted,

and then they give you some
money, and then you can't
do what you want to do,

but anyway, that was InvertNet,
invertebrate network.

That's where that
robot system came from.

As I mentioned, we are a
current participant in SCAN,

which stands for
Symbiota Collections
of Arthropods Network.

That's out of, is
that out of Arizona?

Do you remember? New Mexico?

Southwest of here,
down southwest of here,

just east of everything
that's on fire, probably.

And then we're also right
in the midst right now

of partnering with the
Milwaukee Public Museum

and a whole bunch
of other collections

and submitting a brand
new NSL proposal,

again, part of that TCN, that
Thematic Collection Network,

which is going to be
referred to as the TPT,

the Terrestrial
Parasite Tracker.

This in keeping with the
fact that there's been,

none of these thematic
collections networks

has meant to try to bridge
together the information

from a lot of
disparate collections

that might've been
collecting things

that were associated with
disease transmission,

so vectors.

There are a lot of really
small specialized collections

that never really ever show up

in a collection like ours.

You didn't even
know they're there,

and then some little
parasitology lab somewhere

and somebody has this
really great collection,

but it never really makes it
into a regular collection,

but the data are incredible.

And to have access to that
and get it all digitized,

get it all
relationally available

so we can track, so
that we can track

what's happening to the species

that are the vectors
of the pathogens

that are making us sick.

So that is a proposal that
we're actually in the midst

of writing currently.

Lastly, outreach and
educational activities...

This is not
currently up to date,

although I imagine it's
pretty much the same.

The three-year average,
probably three years ago

last time I did this was
about 1,800 individuals a year

that touch up against us
in some form or other.

We do directly or indirectly
a number of outreach programs

to K-12, to school systems.

We do have site
visits each year.

Sometimes we have these
things called Bug Workshops.

We historically had--
Historically there
was money available

through some Eisenhower
grants and other things

that are available to
teachers that would come here

for a week or two onto campus,

and they would be
supported to do that,

and we had workshops for them.

We've become active in 4-H.

There's a 4-H Leader Youth
Conference here every year,

and we've been
participating in that

to help train and support,
not only the youth,

but the senior leaders
of the projects

and some of the adult
leaders as well.

Several times when entomology

has been a thematic part
of the Science Olympiad,

we've sort of worked
with the students

that were going to
participate in that.

How many of you know of
Grandparents University?

Hi, grandparents.

Well, Grandparents
University's huge.

It's huge all over the place,

and it's very popular
here on campus.

Ran its course, what,
a week or two ago?

There were some very
youngish-looking students

and some rather
seniorish-looking students

running around,
kind of together,

at about mid-day on a hot day

I'd see them all over at
Babcock grabbing ice cream.

That was Grandparents
University.

And we participate
in that, as well.

Jackie, myself,
faculty, grad students,

we very commonly would
be historically asked,

could you come out and do
something for our school?

And love to, but we
can't get away often.

What we've done, though, is
we've developed this group

called the Insect Ambassadors,
which is a consortium of,

and a very informal
consortium of our
graduate students

and some of our advanced
undergraduate students.

And they have a
portal that they use

that you people can go out
to and basically book them

to come to their schools
and do those programs

or in some cases to
actually have the school

come to our campus, and we
can put on a show there,

not necessarily
in the collection,

because we can't accommodate
that many people,

but we oftentimes will
open up our teaching labs

and have that facilitate
what's going on.

There is a, there's an
active course on this campus

through zoology, integrative
biology now, zoology,

called ZOL 405, which is
a museum studies course,

which talks a lot about
natural history collections

in general, techniques.

What are the things you
do in the herbarium?

How do you get that
plant out of that sheet?

What do you do to clean
that mammal skeleton?

What do you do to deal
with that mineral,

that artifact, archeologically?

They visit all of our
collections on campus,

so ZOL 405, Museum Studies,

we've been actively involved
with them every year

for some years now.

In addition to teaching
Introductory Entomology
and a bunch of other ones,

I also teach an advanced
taxonomy series,

a 700-level series,

which intimately involves
students in the collection.

In fact, this fall I'll be
teaching Advanced Taxonomy

of Coleoptera, the beetles,

and so that will
call upon students

to do some work
in the collection.

Hot off the heels
this last spring

of Advanced Taxonomy
of Diptera, the flies,

which we did this last spring.

This is also the summer
I do every other,

so summer of even years, this
is all through the summer, I
taught a field course.

We're into our waning couple
of days of that class.

They're hopefully out
writing a paper for me.

Studies in Field Entomology,

and I guess, actually,
the top image there

is a bunch of students were
sitting over the campfire

getting ready to have our
tasty little foil dinners.

This is out in the Laramie
Mountains in Wyoming.

I take a group of students
out to the Rockies of Wyoming

and then the Black Hills of
South Dakota for two weeks,

and that involves them with
journaling, field work,

and ultimately developing
some oral papers,

presentations, PowerPoint
presentations for the class.

And then, like I said, what
they're doing right now

is putting together a
final written paper.

But very frequently,
when they get back,

they will interact
with the collection

or some of us related
to the collection

to help figure out what it
is that they were looking at

and journaling about.

And that is the end
of the slide show,

and that is time for us
to close the door I guess.

That is time for questions.

(applause)
Yay!