In the last few months, my trusty research assistant Sabidee and I (Li Yuen) have been working hard on a huge dung beetle curation project. Here is an update on the amazing progress we have made so far!
Me and Sabidee with some of our collection boxes
Curation of dung beetles specimens
I have to say that this is fantastic but tedious work! But we know that curating a collection is an enormous responsibility. Museum collections are hugely important as specimens that are properly curated would be available for others to study for hundreds of years to come. The value of the specimens as records of where species occur, what they eat, and how they are responding to changes in the landscape, are often lost if the data and specimens are not properly curated and databased in museum collections.
I have been training SEARRP research assistant, Sabidee, and he is now an expert in pinning and labelling dung beetles! With proper knowledge of how to properly store, curate, label and database large insect collections, ecologists and conservation scientists can contribute to museum and local collections and benefit from their data and specimens which can help inform existing and future studies!
Thousands of dung beetles from the forests of lowland Sabah sorted to create a reference collection.
Labelling of dung beetle specimens
We were working on my collections consisting of 8 large boxes (approx. 13,000 individuals) that were sampled during my undergraduate (2015) and postgraduate studies (2017-18). These specimens are important because very little is known about the distribution or natural history of the dung beetles in the forests of Sabah. My PhD work was one of the first for Southeast Asia to investigate the interactions among different dung beetle species and the different mammal dung types they feed on.
First, we ensured that specimens had no loose body parts or required any form of repair (i.e. glueing). We then labelled each individual beetle with the locality and taxonomic information (locality, date, trapping method, genus, species, collectors name). Although it may sound like an easy job, it takes many days to ensure that each specimen is curated correctly.
Integrating information into Borneensis’ database
The final stage that is currently ongoing is to integrate the specimen information carefully into the museum database. We hope that our collections will encourage the exchange and advancement of our knowledge and understanding of the dung beetles of Sabah, and can serve as a useful reference collection for scientists all over the world. We suspect that we might even have some new species in our collections, which might one day be described!
Written by: Chiew Li Yuen