NC State University Insect Museum

Happy (quite belated) new year! December 31 came and went, as did the NSF DEB pre-proposal deadline (January 9!). We’ve been slammed with personnel changes, courses, meetings, manuscripts, and proposals these last few months, but we definitely want to make time to revisit our resolutions from last year, acknowledge our accomplishments in 2011, and then make a few resolutions for 2012. First, how did we do with respect to our 2011 goals?

1. Finish profiling the collection – We’d profiled our pinned specimens in 2010 and aspired in 2011 to establish protocols for profiling our ethanol-preserved and slide-mounted collections – and then, of course, to actually profile these collections. So, how did we do? Our newest team member, Heather Campbell-Melvin, did a stellar job of evaluating our wet collection, a summary of which was presented at ECN last November. Watch this blog for a thorough account of our metrics. As for the slides … we haven’t touched them yet, primarily due to resource constraints. It’s the collection of least concern for us, based on our anecdotal profiling, so I am comfortable putting it off until 2012. Overall I’m going to declare this resolution a success.
2. Monitor humidity and pest traps twice a month and publish results to the Web – After a quick rethinking of our workflow we chose to monitor the pests only once a month. Other than that change we did indeed manage to establish a rhythm and maintain it throughout the year. Our results are available on the calendar. This resolution was a success, and we’ll carry it into to 2012.
3. Thoroughly inventory, label, and track Museum equipment and supplies – We have quite a supply of insect collecting gear, bought from a variety of sources. Some of this gear needs to be available for other parties within the department, including gung-ho students and instructors for Entomology classes. The rest of the gear is dedicated to Insect Museum missions. In 2011 we wanted to get organized about this equipment (a spreadsheet inventory) and track our loans of this gear. We did manage accomplish these goals, and I’d call this a success.
4. Database Aphididae – Substantial progress was made towards this goal, mainly because we had world aphid experts visit us for an epic slide-scanning event (Bob Foottit and Eric Maw, from the CNC). More on this later, but our aphid slides have been scanned and are in the process of being processed. Huge success here, though we couldn’t have done it without help from our Canadian friends!
5. Portage data to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility – As I said last year, we’ve been close for a long time to getting this done. We’re basically ready, in that our database has been configured to export data in the right format, but we’re not sharing yet. Too many distractions late in 2011. So, I have to declare this resolution a failure, though it probably (hopefully) won’t be a failure for very long.
6. Offer another 52 North Carolina Insects of the Week – Astounding success! These posts are my favorite, as they force me to look at specimens and dive into the literature to learn about insects I don’t usually get exposed to. Our 104th will be this Friday, which marks exactly two years’ worth of North Carolina insects. I expect the posts to continue after that but to be much more erratic, as we shift gears and blog about other topics (more soon).

Up next: accolades, big changes, and resolutions for 2012.

At the end of every year I like to reiterate the highlights, revisit our resolutions, assess progress, and outline goals for the coming year. Here’s my list of what went right at the Insect Museum in 2010, a year that by almost every metric was one of our best:

• After a fair bit of press the Hexapod Haiku Challenge receives >500 entries, from six continents. I count that as a success beyond my wildest dreams. Here are the 2010 bests in show: poet >13 years old, poet <13 years old.
• Along these lines, Katja Seltmann / Irene Moon forged numerous new connections between museum science and the broader arts community by a) projecting an insect-themed video in downtown Raleigh, b) developing an insect-oriented radio show at WFMU (e.g., see Irene Moon’s Insect Corner in these playlists: Art Irritating Life, Psychic Octopus, Art for Nothing), c) delivering an exciting science-art talk in the departmental seminar series, d) opening a dialog between the Insect Museum and the Gregg Museum of Art & Design (more details soon), and e) by installing a mini-gallery outside the Insect Museum, where artists can show their entomological art on a rotating basis.
• One of our research images was selected as part of a juried art exhibit at the Carnegie Mellon Natural History Museum. Wow!
• We grew our Museum blogger community by adding several authors: Andrew Ernst, Trish Mullins, Awma Rinchhuanawma, Katja Seltmann, Matt Yoder, Barb Sharanowski, and Isaac Winkler. Thanks for adding such compelling content!
• On that note, I should acknowledge that Wednesday, December 8 was the single greatest day for the Insect Museum blog, thanks to Isaac’s post on Mormotomyia, a rare and unusual fly from Africa. After some ace investigation work, following a hot lead, Isaac was able to publish a piece about this exciting fly before any other blog or news site got wind of the discovery. His post triggered a 100-fold increase in the amount of traffic we typically receive in a day: >4600 hits!
• Our infrastructure improvements, research, and outreach efforts were highlighted in a report by a team of prominent US Senators! Talk about exposure!
• We successfully published 52 insect of the week posts, the last 15 or so of which were formalized in such a way that we can (eventually) contribute that content to the Encyclopedia of Life and other websites – killing at least four birds with one stone, so to speak. I’ll elaborate on this in the next post.
• A third of the drawers our pinned insect collection have been imaged and published in a way that facilitates annotation, dialog, and collection improvement.
• We databased almost 27,000 Museum specimens, minimally for taxonomic determination (OTU for us) and collecting event data. Our focus for 2010 was on our bee and ladybird beetle collection and so the majority of these specimens are Megachilidae and Coccinellidae.
• We published eight manuscripts that span the breadth of systematic research, from species revisions, to higher-level phylogenetics, to comparative morphology, and biodiversity informatics.
• Our Facebook fan club grew from 47 to 247. Thanks for the recognition!

In short, there was a LOT of activity at the Insect Museum in 2010. I’m sure that 2011 will also be chock-a-block with productivity. Up next, a quick evaluation of last year’s resolutions and then a list of goals for 2011.

UPDATE: Another event that probably falls under the category of 2010 Museum highlights was our display revitalization project. I never did blog the final results as a whole, but the new displays are simply amazing and certainly a lot more informative than the old ones! Thanks to everyone involved!