The Hidden World of Insect Collections and Native Bees

Can you tell us a little bit about the M.T. James Entomological Collection and your role with the collection?

Sure.

So the M.T. James Entomological Collection is as old as, as Washington State University.

It was established about the same time that the university was established as a land-grant institution.

And originally, the mission of the insect collection was pretty much crop pest diagnostics.

There's a lot of agriculture in the Palouse Prairie, so we had a collection of insects so that the farmers could come in and see what was in their crops and what, what was eating it and what they had to be worried about and, and things like that.

Uh, so that's kind of like the original mission, and we actually still have some of those original specimens in the museum.

So we have, um, well over like 130 year old specimens in here.

As long as you take care of them, you can preserve insect specimens basically indefinitely.

They're very easy to take care of 'cause they're all dried out.

They have a hard exoskeleton, so like even if all the soft guts, even if those dry out and shrivel, the exoskeleton remains intact, which is what you're looking at when you're doing science.

So that's kinda the, the cool thing about preservation.

Um, of course, the, the, the museum didn't stay as, as simply a agricultural pest diagnostic service.

We still do some of that.

We, we still do maintain a lot of specimens for the purpose of identification when the public contacts us wanting to know what something is.

But the, yeah, the scope has very much grown over the years.

So we have people working in here, and they go out collecting insects, um, maybe for their own projects or even just for fun, and they bring those specimens back and they deposit them here.

So the collection has been steadily growing over its 130-year history.

And of course, as you're collecting insects, um, you're eventually going to run into things that you don't know what they are.

And when you collect something and you can't figure out what it is, then you have to do some taxonomic research.

So that is kind of like another big component of the, of the purpose of the collection and the research we do.

Um, so originally, of course, it wasn't called the M.T. James Entomological Collection.

Uh, M.T. James, Maurice T. James, was a dipterist and a medical entomologist who worked at WSU, and he started, it was sometime in the '40s, I think.

So it was well into the history of the collection.

Um, but he did so much research and he contributed so many specimens that the museum was eventually named after him after he retired.