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| This is where the magic happens. |
As I mentioned in my first post, I am interning in the entomology department of the National Museum of Natural History. This department has lab space on multiple floors. The different insect groups are sort of on different floors with flies having a floor, beetles having a floor, etc. I am on the floor with nearly everyone working with wasps.
What is amazing about these labs is that there is just as much space, if not more, devoted to storing insects than to the actual lab space and offices for studying insects. Each floor has a row of enormous cabinets filled with drawers and drawers of insects. There are probably millions of specimens in the Smithsonian's insect collection, which is quite impressive if you ask me.
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| Welcome to The Twilight Zone |
Working on the wasp floor is a total of somewhere around 30 interns, a mix of undergraduate and graduate students. In general terms there are two types of projects that students help with. Some students work on imaging or drawing insect specimens. (Some sample images are shown hanging in the hallway below.) It takes a great deal of work and time to take and edit the pictures, but it is very important work.
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| the entomologist's art gallery |
The second half of the interns, the half that I am in, is a group of us sorting and mounting, databasing, and identifying insect specimens. When I was interning in this lab over spring break I helped sort vials of wasps into different groups, pulling out the wasps my adviser wanted, and then mounting them onto pins. What I have been working on so far this summer is databasing wasps.
What I do is take a drawer full of already mounted wasps. Each specimen has some sort of label on them explaining where and when they were collected, who collected them, and sometimes more. I type all of the information available for each specimen into an Excel sheet. I also place a small barcode label on each specimen and this number additionally goes into the Excel sheet, matched up with all of their other information.
What this creates is a file of all the data for a large group of related specimens. Then my adviser can make a map of where all of these specimens were collected and further study them.
Something I enjoy about this kind of work is that at the end of the day you can look at your drawer and sometimes see over one hundred specimens all labeled and lined up, and there is an Excel sheet packed full of information. In the field of entomology hundreds and eventually thousands are typical numbers so you always feel extremely productive.
This is awesome to see! I actually worked at the Smithsonian two summers ago in their Archaeobiology lab, and I was also shocked by the vastness of the museum's holdings. Looking through the Smithsonian collections is a really valuable experience for learning data collection and analysis.
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