ChrisR

At long last I am very pleased to say that the OPAL cabinet project is finished! Yesterday I collected the final batch of drawers from Max at the NHM in London and slotted them into place – as in the photo   The observant amongst you will notice that I have only 36 drawers in the cabinets, not 40, but I have bought 4 extra drawers as ’spares’ for working on accessions outside the cabinet.

Many thanks again to everyone at OPAL, the NHM and the AES for helping make this aquisition go so smoothly. The cabinets are already proving to be incredibly useful and will revolutionize the way we work at the Tachinid Recording Scheme 

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Whilst at the NHM last week Max Barclay kindly sorted me out with some new unit trays for the OPAL-funded cabinets. I have spent a few days transferring the collection over to the new trays and this is the result:

I’m sure you’ll agree, they look really professional and they fit much better than the old, mismatched ones. Many thanks to Max for working late and helping to find and sort-out all the boxes etc.

Hopefully I will be able to go back next week and pick up the remainder of the drawers to finish off the project completely.

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Recently I had a few chances to go back to the NHM in London and work with the world Diptera collections – it was marvellous! I took along some of my larger & more spectacular specimens from North & South America and tried to identify them (with varying levels of success!). I also took lots of photos of the parts of the collection I have been working in, for future reference. Here are just some of the better ones:

Many thanks to Erica McAlister & Nigel Wyatt for hosting my visits

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One of my favourite flies from my recent NHM visits is the amazingly marked Bibiomima handlirschi, a rare phasiine tachinid from Central & South America. This specimen was taken in the Panama Canal Zone in 1913.

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A few of the more dramatic specimens from the neotropics a sample kindly donated by Martin Hauser   Identifications were derrived by comparing ot material in the NHM collections, London.

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I have just spent a really fun day with 2 friends of mine, Becca & John, driving up to the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London to pick up the OPAL-funded insect cabinets!! Max & Howard were away in Peru on a NHM jolly but Paul Brown stood in for them and looked after us very well.

C&D had delivered the cabinets in the previous week and they were there ready for us to collect on arrival. Sadly the supply of drawers had temporarily dried up and the new unit-trays still hadn’t arrived from the suppliers so I can’t fit-out the second cabinet or move my collection over yet but I will collect those in December or January.

Once we had loaded up the van we went off to meet Erica McAlister (Diptera curator) & Silvio Nihei, a very eminent “tachinid-ologist” who is based in the Sao Paulo University Zoological Museum. Silvio is over here working on the types in the NHM tachinid collection, recording them and selecting material to take back with him to Sao Paulo. I gave him some of my French Guianan specimens and in return he will give back as much information as he can to me. He seemed very impressed with them and thinks that I have a few very interesting things in there – including possibly a new species of Borgmeiermyia!

Then after lunch I called in at the Angela Marmont Centre (AMC) to thank Lucy & John at OPAL for their help and funding and let them know how the project was progressing. Lucy showed me round the AMC, which looks like a superb resource for anyone interested in British wildlife and I passed on a few ideas that I have had for the next year’s funding round.

Then we all piled back into the van and came home for a bit of furniture removal, cabinet making & a slap-up curry! The cabinets went together fairly easily with a lot of help from Becca & John and I slotted in the first batch of 20 drawers, stood back and admired them … they look superb!! 

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The 20 NHM drawers

The funding hasn’t come through yet but I always planned to make a contribution myself so last Friday I bought the first 20 drawers from Max Barclay at the Natural History Museum in London! I didn’t have to buy them so quickly but I wanted to make a tangible start to the project and it coincided very nicely with my girlfriend wanting a trip up to London so … I am now the proud owner of 20 hardwood drawers – glass-topped and unlined.

Max (curator of beetles and one of the new faces of the Darwin Center) also kindly agreed to provide me with as many secondhand large unit-trays as I needed – they are slightly short but in all other respects fit the drawers perfectly. I also have an option to buy new unit-trays through the museum – they’re not cheap though so I am counting my pennies and trying to use secondhand as much as possible.

Unit trays are quite a problem because, although you might think that a ‘unit’ implies a standard size, there are multiple sizes. Oxford University Museum and Edinburgh have standardized on a wide ‘accession-type’ drawer; while the Natural History Museum & Cardiff Museum have standardized on a narrower, squarer design of drawer. There are other sizes too and the whole thing screams out for a revision but these massive museums have so many drawers already that it would cost a fortune to rehouse them, not to mention the years of work to transfer specimens into new drawers … sadly it will never happen.

A close-up of a drawer with unit-trays

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This is a strange phasiine tachinid with and extremely long proboscis and long antennae. The curl on this specimen’s antennae may have been caused by the drying process when it was taken out of alcohol – I only have one specimen of this taxon so I have nothing else to compare it with.

UPDATE (30/1/2010): I have obtained 2 more specimens that are pretty-much identical to this and after comparing them with the NHM world collection I have concluded that they are probably Beskia aelops, a widespread phasiine tachinid found from South America to the southern USA.

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