In my role as an assistant digitiser, I have been working to transcribe some of the Museum’s freshwater insects. Whilst looking at the labels of these specimens a pattern started to emerge around the types of data being recorded and I wanted to find out more.
The Museum’s Sensational Butterflies exhibition is host to over 500 butterflies each year. Each morning, work in the Museum’s butterfly house starts two hours before the exhibition opens because it takes constant attention to maintain the ideal environment for these butterflies to flourish. One of the aspects that needs to be attended to is pest control.
Pest-free foliage in the Sensational Butterflies exhibition
One of the most significant pests that needs to be kept under control in the butterfly house are Aphids.
With good weather forecast for most of the UK this coming weekend, and local schools breaking for half-term, many of you will be making a bee-line for the coasts… where you could be rock-pooling for science!
The Big Seaweed Search
Our Big Seaweed Search invites you to take photos of seaweeds and submit your observations online to help Museum researcher Juliet Brodie better understand how rising sea temperatures and other changes are affecting our beautiful seas.
Jules Agate from the Marine Conservation Society and staff from the Museum showcase the Big Seaweed Search at the 2017 Lyme Regis Fossil Festival
We are in the process of digitising the Museum’s parasitic louse (Phthiraptera) collection, which consists of around 73,000 microscope slides. The collection is one of the largest – and the most taxonomically comprehensive – in the world.
Human lice specimens (Pediculus humanus capitis)
Lice are permanent ectoparasites, meaning they live on the outside of their bird and mammal hosts. They are highly host specific, with the majority of the ~5,000 louse species being unique to a particular host species of mammals and birds.
Our previous blog post looked at preparing the Lepidoptera for digitisation. In this post, we will look at the second part of the digitisation process; the imaging and transcription that allows data to be set free and accessed by the global science audience on the Museum’s Data Portal.
The imaging equipment set up to digitise the Lepidoptera collection
Visiteering offers one day volunteering opportunities to the public, linking our Museum narratives to a series of set ‘challenges’ relating to our collections. On 20 October we completed our first collaborative Visiteering session to coincide with a worldwide transcription event run by WeDigBio.
Margaret explains the importance of digitising our collections to the Dangerous Goods Group from the Department of Transport
WeDigBio, is a four day event that engages global participants online and onsite in digitising natural history collections. Although our main focus was our Visiteers in the lab for a day, we also encouraged other visitors to the museum to engage in the project via posters with QR codes and promoted a worldwide audience to get involved with blogposts and social media promotion prior, during and post event.
On Friday 30 September the Miniature Lives Magnified team joined our colleagues in the halls of the Museum in South Kensington for our annual festival, Science Uncovered.
The theme for this year’s event for European Researchers’ Night was Hidden Worlds – a perfect opportunity to invite folks to give our online The Killer Within Expedition a go, and to show off our chalcid wasps!
Miniature Lives Magnified at the Museum’s Science Uncovered event
It was wonderful to meet with such a wide range of visitors, from children coming straight from school with their families, to young adults enjoying a date night with a beer in hand, and of course the full range of ages as Museum-goers enjoyed the chance to chat with all our scientists and learn more about their work.