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see also:
- Out of Africa there is always something
new by J.A. van den Heever
-
Growth of a Collection (Ethnology Collection)
by E. M.Shaw
Introduction
Terrestrial invertebrates include the class Arthropoda, which includes insects,
spiders, mites, and their relatives. The Arthropoda is probably the most
successful group of organisms on the planet, the insects (Hexapoda) alone
accounting for about 55% of all species known to science. The terrestrial
arthropods inhabit every terrestrial habitat and have influenced and continue to
influence the evolution and maintenance of biotic communities. They are
pollinators, predators, parasites and prey. They play a vital role in the
processing and recycling of organic material on the planet as they chew and suck
their way through organisms - living and dead, plant and animal. They are vital
to the food chain of both vertebrates and invertebrates and therefore impact
heavily on man.
The study of insects and their relatives is therefore important in mans’
attempts to preserve and enhance environmental quality, enhance crop production
and quality, manage human health and build commercially viable economies. Pest
species can result in enormous crop losses and ill health while other species
can enhance man’s activities and well being. Pollinators ensure the production
of crops and parasitoids and predators help control pest species. Some species
are even of pharmaceutical value. While mostly regarded as pests they are the
biocontrollers of the planet and play both a positive and negative role in the
lives of humans.
Plants and animals easily attract more attention from the general population
while the importance of insects as part of our support system is largely
overlooked. Society poisons them indiscriminately, crushes them or ignores them.
Each species has a function and a place in nature’s intricate web - it deserves
to be here, it earned its place, it survived the journey of evolution.
The arthropod collections in the entomology department are research collections,
used by scientists both locally and abroad and a loan programme serves their
requirements. The scientists working at the Museum are primarily
taxonomists and systematists. Their business is discovering new species, species associations
and ecological relationships. Their findings are then described and published
and this data can be used in heritage data networks. South Africa is a signatory
to the 1992 United Nations Environment Programme's Convention on Biological
Diversity in Rio de Janeiro and is obliged to make a contribution to the
conservation of biodiversity. Providing data from our research and collections
is one way in which this can be achieved. As the planet's biodiversity is more
and more threatened, so the collections and associated data, housed in natural
history museums, become more important. It is vital that these collections are
maintained and conserved to serve this vast and daunting task of conserving the
remnants of our living heritage.
Natural history museums collect, house and conserve collections that can be used
to study and discover, display and educate, and inspire and entertain within the
realms of the natural world. Everything is now aimed at serving the cultural
needs of society and bolstering the social fabric. New words to describe an old
business. Nothing has really changed. The only difference perhaps is that the
problem which has always prevailed, has grown. The gap between the informed and
uninformed has widened and the only solution, as it has always been, is
education.
While the above is true, natural history museums must now take on greater
responsibilities of education, research and collection management. Our
accountability is no longer limited to appeasing and informing the daily
visitor. The scale of accountability is now global. It has been predicted that,
at the current rate of habitat and species destruction resulting from human
population growth, civilisation will have disappeared by the end of the next
century - "not with a bang but a whimper".
To conserve what we have, we must know and understand what we have. We need to
know identities, distributions, numbers, understand ecological and biological
relationships and many other aspects of the natural world. Natural history
museums have vast holdings of collections and data that can serve to assist with
this huge task of information management for conserving the planet's heritage of
biological diversity
The collections have been assembled by scientists over the decades. They
originated out of research, what is gained from them is through research and
they should continue to grow because of research. Physical access to the
collections by the public has always served, and will continue to serve,
educational and other cultural needs but the most important access to these
collections is by the scientists and through the knowledge gained from research,
both directly and indirectly (e.g. conservation, medicine, agriculture, etc).
While drawers of dead animals can be opened and displayed by teachers and
collection staff, it is through research by the scientist that opens windows of
knowledge.
In the past, the entomological collections clearly suffered as a result of the
absence of standardized methods and procedures to provide the continuity of care
that the biological collections require. Each generation of collection staff has
both solved and created collection-related problems. This manual is aimed at
eliminating the latter by attempting to record the history of collection
management as accurately as possible and provide some continuity thereby
eliminating the possibility of errors being repeated. As new information becomes
available the manual will be revised accordingly.
Conservation and collection management of natural history collections is still a
developing science and collection staff should attempt to stay abreast of new
developments. Iziko South African Museum is a member of the Society for the
Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) and subscribes to the
journal Collection Forum which publishes papers on the latest conservation
issues.
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