Submission Type
Poster
Abstract
Natural history collections are crucial for understanding the world’s biodiversity. These collections also hold important value in educating students about biodiversity, particularly phenotypic diversity. The University of Louisville (UofL) Department of Biology holds a natural history collection, a wet collection of preserved fishes, that appears to have been maintained up through the 1990s. However, due to shifts in funding priorities and faculty interests, much of the collection was relocated and what remains has been neglected for many years. Here, we describe our efforts to rehabilitate, revitalize, and digitize what is left of UofL’s ichthyology collection - transforming it into a teaching collection for organismal biology courses. Ultimately, we hope this collection will be used as a teaching tool for ichthyology, vertebrate zoology, and aquatic biology courses. Our first priority was to triage damaged specimens, attempt to rehydrate desiccated specimens, and replace faulty jars. Next, we cataloged the surviving specimens, organized them, and rehoused them. We cataloged 228 species from 27 different orders and 36 different families. Specimens were collected from all over Kentucky and the southeastern US, as well as rare specimens (haplochromine cichlids) from Lake Malawi. Other specimens of interest include many troglodytic taxa and several specimens collected before they were classified as threatened, vulnerable, or endangered in Kentucky (lampreys, minnows, amblyopsids, and darters). Our next effort is to transfer the temporary catalog to a more permanent digital repository. Next, we will build a digitized image repository for all the fishes native to Kentucky.
Included in
Rehabilitating an aging ichthyology collection and turning into an effective teaching tool for organismal biology
Natural history collections are crucial for understanding the world’s biodiversity. These collections also hold important value in educating students about biodiversity, particularly phenotypic diversity. The University of Louisville (UofL) Department of Biology holds a natural history collection, a wet collection of preserved fishes, that appears to have been maintained up through the 1990s. However, due to shifts in funding priorities and faculty interests, much of the collection was relocated and what remains has been neglected for many years. Here, we describe our efforts to rehabilitate, revitalize, and digitize what is left of UofL’s ichthyology collection - transforming it into a teaching collection for organismal biology courses. Ultimately, we hope this collection will be used as a teaching tool for ichthyology, vertebrate zoology, and aquatic biology courses. Our first priority was to triage damaged specimens, attempt to rehydrate desiccated specimens, and replace faulty jars. Next, we cataloged the surviving specimens, organized them, and rehoused them. We cataloged 228 species from 27 different orders and 36 different families. Specimens were collected from all over Kentucky and the southeastern US, as well as rare specimens (haplochromine cichlids) from Lake Malawi. Other specimens of interest include many troglodytic taxa and several specimens collected before they were classified as threatened, vulnerable, or endangered in Kentucky (lampreys, minnows, amblyopsids, and darters). Our next effort is to transfer the temporary catalog to a more permanent digital repository. Next, we will build a digitized image repository for all the fishes native to Kentucky.
Comments
Rowan Ward1, Devya Hemraj1, Autumn Magnuson1, Morghan McCool1, Matt Kolmann1
1Department of Biology, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292