21 Mar 2015 - Curators of large entomological collections might oversee a million or more specimens, which need to be protected, sorted, and organized. And, it will be the prerogative of the curator to study some subset of their material, to satisfy their curiosity as scientists, and their need to generate papers, the currency of scientific status. So if a entomologist with no international stature asks the curator about their Thysania specimens, how will he/she respond? If you are incredibly lucky, the curator is intrigued, or polite enough to go into their collection and tell you what they have. My best example is Alberto Zilli of the British Museum, with whom I've had a lively correspondence about what the many Thysania samples there tell us. But the more common response is either silence, or "yes we have specimens but I don't have any info on them;" or "there is no curator for lepidoptera at this time." The problem is not that these scientists lack professional courtesy. Rather, it is that support for taxonomy is an unsexy budget item that allocates too few resources to too few curators. --DLC
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AuthorDavid Cappaert Archives
December 2019
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