Tag: entomology

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A GUT FULL OF SAND

UNEARTHING THE PECULIAR EATING HABITS OF A TRIASSIC MAYFLY SPECIES

During the summer months, the beaches of Mallorca offer an irresistible draw for tourists and palaeontologists alike. Visitors to the small Spanish island find themselves lured by its glittering seas, captivating coastline, and tasty white sands…

…well, tasty for some, at least!

Coastal cliffs near Estellencs (Mallorca, Spain). Palaeontologists working here discovered fossils of Triassic mayfly nymphs with unusual gut contents. (photo: Balearic Museum of Natural Sciences)

Following recent fossil excavations near the the coastal town of Estellencs in southwest Mallorca, palaeontologists have discovered evidence of a species of mayfly with a pretty peculiar diet. The mayflies in question lived 240 million years ago in bodies of water associated with ancient floodplains. Some of the juvenile mayflies (nymphs) were so well-fossilised that it has been possible to study the contents of their guts. A research team, led by Dr Enrique Peñalver, and featuring OUMNH’s own Dr Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente, discovered that the mayflies’ digestive tracts contained a mixture of detritus (the decomposed remains of other organisms) and particles of a type of rock known as claystone. The most likely explanation for this strange food-pairing? It seems that the nymphs actually survived by eating muddy sediments that had settled to the bottom of the swampy-waters they lived in – yum!

If you’ve ever tried eating a sandwich on the beach, you’ll be familiar with the feeling of sand in your teeth. The sharp crunch of mineral sediment is worth the sacrifice for the delicious, digestible portion of your sandwich – the bread and fillings. Animal digestive systems are unable to extract energy from inorganic mineral matter, like sand. Instead, we rely on organic material for nutrition, i.e. matter derived from plants and other animals. It seems that the Triassic mayfly nymphs found in Mallorca would have munched through large quantities of sediment; digesting the organic detritus it contained, and excreting the inorganic remainder.

One of the numerous Early Triassic mayfly nymphs from Mallorca preserved with gut contents. These inclusions result from the original sediment the nymphs fed on (cololite, labelled here with arrows). Image adapted from Peñalver et al. (2023).

Sediment-based diets are extremely rare among living insect species. A handful of modern mayfly species have been observed to munch on the muddy sediment that surrounds the openings of their tunnels, but this is a very rare occurrence. Sediment is a pretty challenging food source, and it’s hard to say why insects may have relied more heavily on it in the ancient past. It is possible that the mayflies found in Mallorca adopted their diet as a result of the Permian mass extinction, which killed off more than 80% of all the species on Earth, ‘just’ five million years prior. With fewer choices of organic material available to eat, perhaps the mayflies were left without a better choice? Or maybe they were simply exploiting new environmental niches that opened up in the aftermath of this catastrophic event?

One of the reasons why it is so difficult to theorise about the evolution of species following the Permian mass extinction is the dearth of fossil evidence dating from the period. Luckily, the coastal cliffs of Mallorca can offer us a rare, exciting glimpse into some of the ecosystems that existed ~247 million years ago. The research team behind the Mallorcan mayfly discovery have also used fossils from the same site to describe the world’s oldest-known dipteran (a group of insects including flies, mosquitoes, gnats, and midges), naming the species Protoanisolarva juarezi. These flies would have lived on land, in back swamp areas, rather than in the water. However, much like the Triassic mayfly nymphs, they would have fed on detritus, and played a key role as recyclers of organic matter in these ancient ecosystems.

The larva of the oldest-known gnat, 247 million years old, was found near Estellencs in Mallorca. (Image: CN-IGME CSIC).

It is by paying attention to tiny insect fossils like these that we might hope to find answers to one of the biggest questions in palaeontology: how did life rebuild in the aftermath of our planet’s worst mass extinction? And what might this teach us about ecosystem responses to future mass extinction events?

By Ella McKelvey, Web Content and Communications Officer

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A.R. WALLACE’S ARCHIVE NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE

“In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvellous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found.”

– A.R. Wallace

2023 marks a number of important anniversaries in the UK: it has been 75 years since the founding of the NHS and the arrival of the Empire Windrush in London, and 100 years since the first outside broadcast by the British Broadcasting Company. Importantly for the Museum, it is also the 200th anniversary of the birth of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), the trailblazing biologist, geographer, explorer, and naturalist.

Wallace was one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the nineteenth century and is most well-known for independently developing the theory of natural selection simultaneously with Charles Darwin. The publication of Wallace’s paper “On the Tendency of Varieties of Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type” in 1858 prompted Darwin to quickly publish On the Origin of Species the following year. He was a pioneer in the field of zoogeography and was considered the leading expert of his time on the geographical distribution of animal species. He was also one of the first scientists to write a serious exploration of the possibility of life on other planets.

Wallace undertook extensive fieldwork in the Amazon River basin and the Malay Archipelago. He spent four years in the Amazon from 1848-52 but unfortunately lost much of his collection when the ship he returned to Britain on caught fire. Afterwards, he spent eight years in the Malay Archipelago (1854-62), building up a collection of 125,660 specimens including 109,700 insects, many of which are currently housed at Oxford University Museum of Natural History. In fact, we now hold one of the largest collections of Wallace specimens in the country.

Papillio ulysses (Ulysses butterfly) collected by A.R. Wallace
Psychonotis caelius (small green banded blue butterfly) collected by A.R. Wallace

In addition to entomological specimens, OUMNH holds a large and varied archival collection relating to Wallace. The archive includes original insect illustrations sent to Wallace by contemporary entomologists, photographs, and even obituaries. By far the largest portion of the collection is 295 letters of correspondence, of which 285 were penned by Wallace himself. The bulk of Wallace’s letters were written to fellow scientists, including the chemist and naturalist Raphael Meldola and the evolutionary biologist Edward Bagnall Poulton.

We are happy to announce that, in celebration of Wallace’s 200th year, we are making the entire Wallace correspondence available to browse online!

Several of the letters in the collection can be connected to the Wallace entomological collections held at OUMNH, providing us with invaluable insights into the history of these specimens. For example, you can read this 1896 letter from Wallace to Poulton in which Wallace discusses the changing of hands of his entomological collections, from Samuel Stevens to Edmond Higgins following Stevens’ retirement in 1867. The Museum subsequently acquired some of Wallace’s entomological specimens through Edmond Higgins, including the two beautiful examples shown above.

Photographic portrait of A.R. Wallace from the OUMNH archive
Envelope of a letter from A.R. Wallace addressed to Poulton, also available from the OUMNH archive

These letters are a potential treasure trove of information about Wallace and his collections, and we hope they will be of great interest to researchers in the field, as well as to the public. Interested? Learn more about Alfred Russel Wallace or explore his archive online.

Article by Matthew Barton, Digital Archivist at OUMNH

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One door closes, another opens…

By Anna Jones, HOPE Project Manager

At the start of National Insect Week, Anna Jones reflects on an entomological escapade that has involved the relocation of over one million insects, and that will allow us to transform the Westwood Room into a ‘Museum within a Museum’ for the first time this autumn…

When we set out on our HOPE adventure in the winter of 2019, what was being called an ‘ambitious’ task seemed almost impossible. Could Museum staff, volunteers, and interns restore, rehouse, and relabel over one million British insects in just over one year?

HOPE for the Future is the Museum’s three-year project to protect and share our amazing British Insect Collection. HOPE is a natty acronym that spells out the project’s aims (Heritage, Outreach and Preservation of Entomology), and is also a nod to Frederick William Hope, a founding collector of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and thanks to National Lottery Players, the project focuses on the intertwined heritage of our British Insect Collection and the Westwood room.

The Museum’s British Insect Collection represents all insect groups from butterflies to beetles and bees, flies, and fleas. It is ‘Designated’ by Arts Council England as being of national and international importance.

The Collection spans almost the entire history of British entomology, providing extensive information on biodiversity during and after the Industrial Revolution. It offers an extraordinary window into the natural world, and includes dozens of iconic species now considered extinct in the UK, like the large copper butterfly and blue stag beetle. In order to protect these valuable specimens, we had to transfer them by hand from their old cork-lined drawers, preventing reactions between the cork and the insects’ pins from degrading the specimens and making them friable. These drawers were then transferred out of their original home, in the Westwood room, to new cabinets elsewhere in the Museum.

Our British Insects in their new drawers
Celebrating the achievements of the HOPE Project

Finally, the meticulous moving of specimens is miraculously complete; an achievement described by our Director as “beyond the Museum’s wildest dreams”. Now the last of the cabinet doors is snugly closed, we rest assured that our collections are secure and will be preserved for the public for years to come. At the same time, we prepare ourselves to take the trailblazing step of opening the doors to the Westwood room to the public for the first time.

Originally called “Mr Hope’s Musuem”, the Westwood room became a favourite meeting place for naturalists in the nineteenth century. Now empty, the Westwood room can be restored to its former Pre-Raphaelite glory. We will also transform the room to create a new multi-purpose public space with displays on biodiversity, habitat loss, and how we can use museum collections to study our environment.

HOPE for the Future will allow the public to access the Westwood room for the first time: a beautiful, historic, and artistically-important part of the Pre-Raphaelite history of the Museum. From Autumn 2022, we will use the space to host insect-focused public engagement programmes and other popular Museum events — all connected to our learning and community programmes. Here. we hope to inspire the next generation of scientists and encourage people to care more for the wildlife on their doorsteps.

Want to learn more about insects?

  • Events: HOPE has many outreach activities coming up over the next few months, including Summer Schools, Discovery Days, and Entomologist Clubs with children and young people. We also run an outreach programme with families, grandparents, and community elders, encouraging thousands of people to appreciate insects, and their relationships to humans and other wildlife.
  • Crunchy on the Outside: read our blog for young entomologists
  • Donate to the HOPE appeal: help us to continue to inspire the public to learn about insects

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A Fashion Flea-esta

By Danielle Czerkaszyn, Librarian and Archivist

In September 2021, the Museum initiated its first “Specimen Showdown” on Twitter and Instagram, where followers could vote on their favourite specimens from our collections. Over the course of the month, followers narrowed down their favourite among 32 specimens from four collections: The Library Legends, The Bygone Beasts, The Rock Stars, and The Birds and The Beetles. The final showdown was between the Connemara Column (found in the Main Court of the Museum) and the Pulgas Vestidas from the Library and Archives. In a nail-biting race, the Pulgas Vestidas narrowly beat the column with 53.9% of the vote.

But what are Pulgas Vestidas? And why are they so popular?

Dressed fleas, you say?

The delicate art of dressing fleas in tiny costumes, known as ‘Pulgas Vestidas’ in Spanish, flourished in Mexico for over two centuries. It is believed that the craft began in Mexican convents where nuns would fashion tiny pieces of clothing onto dead fleas. An important point to note is that the fleas themselves were not actually dressed — instead, they formed the heads of the figures. The individual fleas were set in matchboxes and decorated with elaborate human costumes, hats, shoes, and accessories. Sometimes the fleas were set in whole scenes, often as married couples in miniature dioramas of everyday life. The bride and groom sets were the most popular, with the bride sporting a long veil and the groom in his best suit. The nuns would then sell the fleas for a small amount of money to passing tourists. The trade was later picked up by the local villagers and Pulgas Vestidas were widely sold to tourists visiting Mexico in the early twentieth century.

Dressed fleas in a scene that reminds the editor of Don Quixote
A dressed flea marriage scene

Dressed fleas were popular with tourists until the 1930s when the art declined in popularity. An increasing awareness of hygiene meant that fleas were rapidly regarded as unhealthy. Many dressed fleas were consigned to the bin, and Pulgas Vestidas became a lost art as tourists’ tastes for memorabilia changed. Examples of these tiny curiosities are now rare collectors’ items.

Pulgas Vestidas at Oxford University Museum of Natural History

The Museum’s dressed fleas were collected in 1911 by American archaeologist and anthropologist Zeila M. M. Nuttall who specialised in Mexican history and culture. She sent the dressed fleas to her brother, bacteriologist George H.F. Nuttall. George formally donated a collection of 50 Ixodidae (ticks) to the Museum, and it is likely he also gifted the dressed fleas at the same time. The dressed fleas would have been considered more of a Victorian novelty, and so were not formally recorded or accessioned into our collections.

Although most of OUMNH’s dressed fleas reside behind-the-scenes, one example is on public display in the Upper Gallery of the Main Court. Sporting tiny clothes and a backpack, the flea is just visible with the help of a magnifying glass. Clearly, this one was born to flea wild.

Dressed flea on display in the Museum
Danielle will be presenting the dressed fleas at our Late Night event

OUMNH’s Pulgas Vestidas are definitely among the more unusual items in the Museum’s collections, and they were clearly head and shoulders above other specimens in the September Specimen Showdown competition, despite being no more than 5mm tall! Pulgas Vestidas may be small, but they certainly are mighty.

I’ll Flea There

The dressed fleas will be on display, with a flea-tastic craft, for the Museum’s free evening event ‘Late Night: A Buzz in the Air‘ on 27 May from 7-10pm.

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Community science: what’s the value?

ONE SCIENTIST OFFERS HER PERSPECTIVE

By Sotiria Boutsi, Intern

I am PhD student at Harper Adams University with MSc in Conservation Biology, currently doing a professional internship at the Museum of Natural History in the Public Engagement office. My PhD uses genomic data to study speciation in figs and fig wasps.

For most of our history, humans have been observational creatures. Studying the natural world has been an essential tool for survival, a form of entertainment, and has provided the backbone for various legends and myths. Yet modern humans are rapidly losing practice when it comes to environmental observation. As more and more of us relocate to busy urban environments, we find ourselves with little to no time to spend outdoors. Knowledge of the natural world is rapidly becoming the purview of professionals — but it doesn’t have to be this way…

Community science is a term that describes scientific research activities conducted by amateurs, often involving observation or simple computational tasks. Many citizen science projects target schools or families, but everyone is a welcome participant. The purpose of such projects, which run all around the world, is to encourage non-professionals to get involved in science in a fun, voluntary manner, while also collecting data that are valuable for scientific research.

One of the most common forms of community science is biodiversity monitoring. Biodiversity monitoring projects invite people with various levels of expertise to record observations of different species in their local area, and upload evidence like photographs and sound recordings to a user-friendly database. In doing so, they also provide important monitoring data to scientists, like information about the date and location of wildlife sightings.

The Asian Ladybeetle (Harmonia axyridis) was first spotted in the UK in 2004 and since then it has become very common. It is considered one of the most widespread invasive species in the world, with introductions throughout Europe, North and South America, as well as South Africa. Reported observations through the UK Ladybird Survey (Enter ladybird records | iRecord) can help us monitor the spread of this insect and see how other, native species respond to its presence.

There are a variety of mobile apps and online platforms for reporting observations, with some specialising in particular groups of organisms like plants or birds. From the raw data that is uploaded to these platforms, species can be identified through a range of different methods:

  1. Automatic identification from uploaded evidence – often using techniques like image/sound analysis or machine learning
  2. Community feedback – multiple users can view uploaded evidence and make suggestions about which species have been recorded
  3. Direct use of users’ own suggestions – for users who are more experienced with species identification

But are these data actually used by scientists? Although individual contributions to community science projects may seem to be of minor importance, when considered collectively they act as extremely valuable records. Having distribution data for species can help us understand their habitat preferences, and also enable us to monitor invasive organisms. Moreover, long-term data can inform us about species’ responses to changes in their environments, whether that is habitat alteration or climate change. Science is driven by the accumulation of data, and citizen science projects can provide just that.

Biodiversity monitoring through citizen science projects encourage us to notice the tiny beings around us, like this beautifully coloured shiny Green Dock Beetle (Gastrophysa viridula). Moreover, recording common species like the European Honeybee (Apis mellifera) over different years can reveal temporal patterns, like early arrival of spring.

In addition to the benefits to the scientific field, community science projects can also be of huge value to their participants. Firstly, engaging in such activities can help us re-establish our relationship with the wildlife in our immediate environment — we might finally learn to identify common species in our local area, or discover new species that we never realised were so close by. It is surprising how many species we can even find in our own gardens! Moreover, community science events, like biodiversity-monitoring “BioBlitzes”, encourage people from different backgrounds to work together, strengthening local communities and encouraging environmental protection.

Oxford University is currently running the community science project “Oxford Plan Bee“, focusing on solitary bees. The project is creating a network of bee hotels: small boxes with branches and wooden cavities where harmless, solitary bees can rest. The hotels are spread throughout the city, and locals are invited to observe the bee hotels, take photos, and send in their findings.

Overall, community science is as much about being an active participant in the community as it is about doing science. These projects are a celebration of both collective contributions and individual growth. More than anything, they are a chance to pause and notice the little things that keep our planet running.

Want to get involved? Here is a selection of my favourite citizen science projects…

Recording species observations – global:

Recording species observations – UK-based:

Bioblitz events:

Read more:

How a Citizen Science project helped solve a mystery of UK butterflies: Painted Lady migration secrets unveiled – News and events, University of York

Citizen Science Hub – British Ecological Society

Citizen Science Platforms | SpringerLink

Citizen Science in the Natural Sciences | SpringerLink

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Disappearing Butterflies

HOW TO SOLVE A BIOLOGICAL MYSTERY USING MUSEUM COLLECTIONS AND DNA TECHNOLOGY

By Rebecca Whitla, PhD student at Oxford Brookes University

The Black-veined white butterfly (Aporia crataegi) was a large, charismatic butterfly with distinctive black venation on its wings. Once commonly found in the UK, the species unfortunately went extinct here in around 1925, with the last British specimens collected from Herne Bay in Kent. It isn’t fully understood why the species disappeared from the UK, but climate change, predation, parasites, and disease have all been suggested to have caused its disappearance — perhaps with several of these factors contributing to its decline. Central to solving the mystery of the disappearance of the Black-veined white will be the collections of butterflies that are stored in museums like OUMNH.

Butterflies tend to be well-represented in museum collections, and the Black-veined white is no exception. While the species has now been extinct in the UK for around 100 years, Lepidoptera enthusiasts from previous centuries often captured wild Black-veined white specimens for their personal collections. The abundance of Black-veined white butterflies in museum collections, like the collections at OUMNH, serve as a valuable repository for scientific research — including my own!

Black-veined white butterflies in the collections at OUMNH

Between June and December 2021, I undertook a research project using OUMNH’s Black-veined white butterflies. My task was to extract enough DNA from the butterflies to use for ‘whole genome sequencing’ — in other words, I was attempting to extract DNA from butterfly specimens to decode their complete DNA sequence. Getting DNA sequences from the historical specimens that are kept in Museums is no easy task, as DNA degrades over time. Nonetheless, animal specimens from natural history museums have successfully been used for whole genome sequencing and genetic analysis in the past, including species as diverse as longhorn beetles and least Weasels.

In order to work out how to extract DNA from the specimens, I had to try a variety of methods. This included experimenting to find out whether butterfly legs or abdomen fragments yielded more DNA, and whether non-destructive methods of DNA extraction were as effective as destructive methods. An example of a non-destructive method of DNA extraction would be a process like soaking a sample overnight and using the leftover liquid for DNA extraction, whereas a destructive method might involve mashing a whole leg or abdomen segment to use as a DNA source.

Preparing a DNA sample

Overall, I found that destructively sampling the legs of the butterflies gave the most reliable results, and also had the added benefit of not destroying the wings or abdomen of the specimens. Keeping the wings and abdomens of the butterflies intact will likely prove useful for conducting morphological studies in future.

Now that I have a reliable DNA extraction method, the next step in my research will be to analyse more Black-veined white specimens from a span of different time periods leading up to the species’ disappearance. I will then compare samples collected from each time period to calculate the genetic diversity of the species at each point in time, leading up to its disappearance. If I find a steady decline in the species’ genetic diversity over time, this may indicate a gradual extinction of the species. This is because we expect that, as numbers of a species decrease, inbreeding will become common, resulting in less diversity in the species’ DNA. However, if the populations of Black-veined white butterflies went extinct very suddenly, the decline in genetic diversity will probably be less pronounced. Learning more about the fate of the Black-veined White could not only help us unlock the historical mystery of the species’ decline in Britain, but will also help us understand more about the species’ decline in other parts of the world.

British Insect Collections: HOPE for the Future is an ambitious project to protect and share the Museum of Natural History’s unique and irreplaceable British insect collection. Containing over one million specimens – including dozens of iconic species now considered extinct in the UK – it offers us an extraordinary window into the natural world and the ways it has changed over the last 200 years. The HOPE for the Future project is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, thanks to National Lottery players.