This modern technology is meshing with some of the most time-tested scientific methods.
The MCZ continues to send out regular collecting expeditions. Hanken himself still goes collecting in Mexico’s cloud forests.
Millions and Growing
Along with harboring a large number of benchmark specimens—those by which whole species are defined—Harvard’s collections are some of the world’s biggest and most important.
“The MCZ is regarded as a world resource,” Hanken says. “It is on par with the finest natural history collections anywhere in the world: the British Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History. We are right up there with them. Far and away, it is the most important and largest university research collection anywhere.”
In addition to Boss’s mollusk collection, there are 11 other departments in the MCZ, ranging from vertebrate paleontology to icthyology, the study of fish.
The ant collection, built up by Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus Edward O. Wilson, is touted as the largest and most significant gathering of ants in the world.
The Department of Entomology alone has more than seven million specimens. Many of the species represented in the museum are now extinct—from dodos to dinosaurs.
But museum is still searching for new specimens.
The museum is sending Shi-Tong T. Hsieh, a fourth-year graduate student in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, to Guam to study and collect fish.
Hsieh studies the effects of skin surfaces on locomotion. She has used the collection to study a species of lizard that can that run on water. Now, she is looking at a “very acrobatic, energetic” fish from Guam that spends 90 percent of its life out of the water.
According to Hsieh, there are still “large gaps” in Harvard’s collections—one of which she will fill during her trip to Guam.
“When you take an animal and you stick it in a collection, you don’t just have a dead animal lying around,” Hsieh says. “We loan them out, do a lot of anatomical descriptions, research, phylogenetics and figuring out how different species are related.”
In the future, Hsieh says she sees even broader uses for museums and their collections.
“You can go into a collection now and pull a specimen that was collected back in the 1800s off the shelf, and pull out stomach contents to find out what it ate,” Hsieh says.
“With the current expansion of humans into everywhere in the world, collections are going to become more and more important in terms of conservation efforts,” she says.
—Staff writer Ben A. Black can be reached at bblack@fas.harvard.edu.