Introduction
In 2016, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History celebrated its 150th anniversary. It was an occasion to look back on an illustrious history of scientific collecting, through the publication of two books (Conniff, 2016; Skelly and Near, 2016), a program of talks, and a temporary exhibit entitled Treasures of the Peabody Museum: 150 Years of Exploration and Discovery. In a darkened exhibit hall a handpicked selection of objects was presented, drawn from the nearly 13 million specimens that make up the Peabodyâs collection: an eclectic physical prĂ©cis of the museumâs holdings that encompassed a rifle belonging to Buffalo Bill; a type specimen of a Tahitian fern collected on the US Exploring Expedition of 1838â42; a pickled tentacle of a giant squid captured in Newfoundland in 1873; the first microscope ever used at Yale, from 1735; and a dog-drool collector belonging to Ivan Pavlov.
Natural history museums and their collections are often thought of in terms of the past, which is not surprising. We are probably the only type of scientific research facility that can claim the ability to time travel, albeit in a patchy and far from perfect way. Our business is intimately connected with the past, both recent and deep time, and much of what humans know about the natural world of a hundred, a hundred thousand, or a hundred million years ago arises directly or indirectly from the specimens held in our collections. When your child states with certainty that Tyrannosaurus rex lived in the Cretaceous period they are, knowingly or unknowingly, drawing on the results of research done using museum collections.
There is, however, a considerable difference between studying the past and belonging in the past. A cursory glance at the cavalcade of sepia-toned images, polished brass instruments, and handwritten jar labels in the Peabodyâs anniversary exhibition might give the impression that the Museumâs glory days are behind it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Closer inspection of the exhibition revealed specimens that were collected only a few years ago, research performed with cutting-edge technology, and collection-based science projects that address some of the most pressing issues facing us today; fundamental questions about the future of the planet and our species.
Natural history collections face four main challenges: acquiring material, preserving that material, making it available for use, and making the case that the first three activities are worthy of support. These challenges are eternal ones, which have faced museums since their inception and are likely to persist for as long as museums exist. But natural history collections have undergone a quiet revolution in the last thirty years, which has the potential to create an exciting future in which collections play an even greater role in society.
To say that natural history collections are facing a dynamic future that is both exciting and alarming may surprise many people. But in some ways, that future is already here, and the extent of the surprise being expressed is one of the challenges we face in responding to it.
The challenge of collecting
In 1921, a caravan of heavily loaded Dodge automobiles passed through the Great Wall of China at Kalgan and headed west, into the deserts of Mongolia. Led by Roy Chapman Andrews (frequently cited as the inspiration for George Lucasâs Indiana Jones, despite repeated denials from Lucas), the American Museum of Natural Historyâs (AMNH) Central Asiatic Expeditions have shaped the public perception of natural history collecting. Between 1921 and 1928, Andrews and his colleagues shipped thousands of paleontological, zoological, and botanical specimens back to New York. The tales and images of weather-beaten explorers, gun-toting bandits, camel trains, and dinosaur bones being hacked from the rocks of the Gobi Desert in books and periodicals made Andrews very much the media star of his time (Gallenkamp, 2001).
But the expeditions were also a product of their time, as was Andrews. Frequently forgotten amid the triumphalism of their finds was the underpinning purpose of the trip: to find evidence of early humans that would support the theory of American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) President Henry Fairfield Osborn that Central Asia was the cradle of human evolution. In Osbornâs worldview, people of color occupied the far-flung edges of the planet, having been displaced by the more âadvanced Nordicsâ situated in Eurasia. Absurd though this idea may seem today, in the 1920s such racially based theories were not considered outside the scientific mainstream. They reflected prevailing attitudes of the time, which could also be seen in the conduct of the expedition. Neither Osborn nor Andrews showed much respect for their Chinese hosts, who they variously described as corrupt, callous, effeminate, self-indulgent, and lazy. Team photographs show the expedition personnel to be almost entirely white and male. The few Mongolians present are relegated to the role of cooks, camel drivers, and porters (Regal, 2002).
The Central Asiatic Expeditions reflected a belief that American knowledge exceeded that of the Chinese and Mongolians, and that this justified taking possession of specimens and data from their territories (Rainger, 1991, p. 104). The great natural history collections of the world were born in the heyday of Western colonialism when the right of their scientists to collect specimens from around the world was unquestioned. Today we work in a world that is very different, and our assumptions about our role and that of others are, we hope, also very different from those that underpinned the building of the museum collections in which many of us work. For natural history museums, one of the key elements of this is the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which was launched at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and has been in force since 1993. The principles behind the CBD were that biodiversity should be conserved for the benefit of humanity, that the benefits should be derived from sustainable usage, and that those benefits should be shared fairly and equitably (United Nations, 1992).
Traditionally, natural history museums saw their role as supplying the science on which our understanding of biodiversity was based, but there were cases where more directly commercial benefits could accrue. For example, alkaloids extracted from specimens of poison dart frogs collected in Ecuador by the AMNH form the basis of a number of promising analgesic drugs under commercial investigation (Angerer, 2011). But the implementation of the 2010 Nagoya Protocol to the Committee on Biological Diversity (CBD), which sets out the legal framework for access and benefit sharing of genetic resources came as an unpleasant surprise to many museums. With the implementation of the protocol in 2014, biological collections of the sort that museums have been making for decades are regarded as valuable resources and treated accordingly (Neumann et al., 2014).
This has implications not just for collecting, but also for routine operations such as processing of specimens, sampling, or loans of specimens from one museum to another. All these operations require Prior Informed Consent (PIC) for the procedure from the country of origin beforehand and Mutually Agreed Terms (MAT) for how any resulting benefits will be handled. The country of origin for the material is entitled to place limitations on the purposes for which specimens are used, and to specify conditions that ensure a reciprocity of benefits. Those benefits can be monetary or non-monetary, which means that arguing that the results of museum-based research are rarely commercialized makes no differenceâin principle, any benefits obtained from the possession or study of the genetic material in the specimens, be they commercial, scientific, educational, or promotionalâshould be shared with the country of origin (Neumann et al., 2014).
To some extent, museums are already addressing these issues, and have been for some time. Modern collecting expeditions are usually partnerships between the host country and the museum, encompassing multiple stakeholders, and with an emphasis on training staff, and building collection capacity in the host country. They are governed by a raft of documentation, including collaborative agreements, collecting permits, export permits, and import permits. In most cases, the collecting agreement will also specify the disposition of any specimens collected, limiting the number and type of specimens that can be exported, and for certain categories of rare material, such as vertebrate fossils, it is not unusual for the overseas institution to retain none of the material; instead, permission is granted to make casts of the fossils, with the originals and molds returning to the host country.
Nonetheless, it is likely that Nagoya will bring more challenges, as host countries seek both to capitalize on their biodiversity and build local capacity. As museums, we should embrace this; greater stakeholder engagement, transfer of skills, and the creation of new collaborating partners are all good things for our long-term future. But it also raises the question of whether, as local capacity grows, Western institutions can continue to grow their collections globally. The countries in question are often the regions of greatest biodiversityânot only are they the places where everyone wants to collect, but they are also the areas in which collecting efforts should be concentrated, as they are often regions where the potential for biodiversity loss is most sizable. Previously, museums in the Western world took a rather asymmetric view of the collaborations necessary to achieve this.
One example of this is the concept of the âparataxonomist,â attributed to the ecologist Daniel Janzen (1991) and embraced with enthusiasm by the taxonomic community during the 1990s. The parataxonomist was a local worker who had been given basic training in species identification. The idea was that this individual would carry out the initial bulk sorting of specimens, but as soon as something interesting emerged, an expert (usually not local, and often from an overseas institution) would be called in to describe it. The work of the parataxonomist thus saves the more valuable time of the taxonomist. It was a well-intentioned idea, which sought to cope with the very real resource challenges associated with describing massive numbers of species in a finite period, but it is questionable whether it could be described as truly collaborative.
In the twenty-first century, the only way this massive species description effort will work sustainably is with at least some of the leadership coming from the countries that actually âownâ the biodiversity. As many of them are struggling to lift their people out of the trap of poverty, this will be a big hurdle to overcome. More recent efforts to address the biodiversity crisis, such as the âcall to armsâ by Wheeler et al. (2012), have placed a strong emphasis on providing resources to develop collections and in-country expertise in areas of high biodiversity; this is at least as important as developing expertise and building collections in the developed world. It was telling that of the thirty-nine authors and twenty-five institutions represented in the Wheeler et al. paper, thirty-four authors and twenty-one of the institutions were US based, and only one author was from a country with an emerging economy (in this case, Brazil), even though most of the worldâs undescribed biodiversity resides outside the United States and Europe. There is a considerable (and perhaps understandable) resentment in many parts of the world toward the mining of biodiversity by âfirst worldâ institutions, and any large-scale program of species description needs to address this imbalance.
The process of collecting itself is receiving increasing scrutiny. The emergence of social media and the ability of scientists to share their work with the public have resulted in valuable exposure for museumsâ biodiversity conservation activities, while raising uncomfortable questions concerning long-established work practices. One example of this was the first-ever collection of a male specimen of the moustached kingfisher (Actenoides bougainvillea), an endemic species from the Solomon Islands, by a team from the American Museum of Natural History. The discovery, in October 2015, was announced on the expedition blog by the ornithologist who captured the kingfisher (Filardi, 2015a). When it emerged that the animal had been euthanized there was a storm of protest, communicated via comments on the Audubon Society article that reported the discovery (Silber, 2015), a subsequent article by the collector explaining the basis of the decision to collect the bird (Filardi, 2015b), and negative coverage in mainstream media (for a typical example, see Klausner, 2015).
This is not a new issue, especially in ornithology (see Remsen, 1995; Donegan, 2000; Winker et al., 2010), but it has been given new urgency by the increasing use of technology in collecting. If a biologist can take digital images, sound recordings, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), and other tissue samples sufficient to produce a species description (see, for example, Sangster and Rozendaal, 2004; Athreya, 2006), is it still necessary to kill the individual in order to obtain a voucher specimen? Many members of the public would say âno,â as do some academics. In 2014, a paper in Science by Minteer et al. (2014) argued that given the precipitous decline in abundance for many species, it was unethical for museums to kill additional members of these species when nonlethal alternatives exist. There are, of course, strong counterarguments in favor of physical vouchers. Any species whose long-term viability can be significantly affected by the removal of one or two individuals is already effectively extinct: without aggressive human intervention (through, for example, capture and captive breeding), natural mortality will far exceed this. The process of capturing, anesthetizing, and sampling a small animal will significantly compromise its fitness, increasing mortality rates. Finally, a blood sample and a photograph can provide only a very limited amount of information about a speciesâa fraction of what could be obtained from a full body voucher specimen. It is not possible to re-examine the type specimen to validate the original description, and any new questions not answered by the type description will require the collection of another specimen, compromising the fitness of yet another individual.
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