Return to the Natural History Museum London

After a long 3 years wait, I am back at NHM London!

After years of pandemic obstruction and parental leave, I could finally return to the Natural History Museum of London, almost exactly 3 years since I last went in October 2019.

The purpose of my return to the museum was to sample some of the specimen I had not had time to sample last time (for stable isotope analysis), and to look thoroughly at the larvae and exuviae collection.

As I once again entered the elevator that goes up to the offices of the curators and the insect collection room, the smell of naphthalene hit almost immediately. It is a somewhat sweet smell, and a little metallic. It doesn’t smell bad, but it is very strong and did linger on my computer case some days after. I rather like it, it reminds you of where you are, in a place where people for centuries have tried to preserve and understand nature.

In terms of what to wear in the cold collection room, I was better prepared. I had a wooly hat and fingerless gloves with me, and a knitted wool cardigan (that has gotten me through many a Swedish winters). You are not allowed to wear big bulky clothing – as it can get caught in things and break valuable collection material, so an outdoor jacket is not a good idea.

I was joined in the collection room by a Japanese researcher, photographing a type of teeny tiny fly that lives on freshwater sponges. Wild.

They are called spongeflies, Sisyridae, and are members of Neuroptera, the order that also contain antlions and dobsonflies (imagine an earwig, but giant with wings, and that have the horns in its face instead of the butt – I know!, the stuff of nightmares).

As before, I was soon engulfed by excitement and wonder as I opned the cupboards and pulled out the drawers with genus names like “Anax” and “Pantala”.

Most (or all??) of the specimen in these drawers are old, collected in the late 1800s and pre-II world war 1900s. And your imagination just start spinning when you read the little notes that accompanies the specimen.

The placenames are sometimes collonial, like “British East Africa” or “Rhodesia”, and you start to wonder how it was like for the person who collected these insects in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in the early 1910s, or China in the 1930s or Socotra (Yemen) in 1898…!! They are long gone now. But their dragonflies persist, - often just barely, with the heads fallen off and legs missing, but still, they are here, decades and decades later. The stuff of research for generations to come.

There are many places in the world that you rarely think about, naturally, because you have no reason to. They are far away, or small, or remote, or all of these things. And then something happens that makes you stop and look it up. Socotra was one of those unknown places for me. I had never ever heard of this island, and then when I first visited the NHM in 2019, I saw it on one of the notes accompanying a collected specimen of Pantala flavescens.

SOCOTRA.

It is an island in the Indian Ocean, about 240 km northeast of the tip of Somalia. It belongs to Yemen, but it lies in Africa. It is smaller than Cyprus but bigger than Mallorca. Home to many endemic animal and plant species and rather unearthly in its appearance.

I found more specimens collected on Socotra when I visited the museum this time. Like the one on the picture, which I, to my amazement, also could identify in an old publication about the expedition during which it was collected. It was captured on the Hadibu Plain in 1898, by Scottish explorers and ornithologists William Robert Ogilvie-Grant and Henry Ogg Forbes during their Socotra and Abd al Kuri-expedition.

Besides the globe skimmer collected by Ogilvie-Grant and Forbes in 1898, I also sampled globe skimmers and vagrant emperors collected on Socotra in 1946 by famous military man and travel-story writer Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger, and in 1953 by Mr G Popov.

Perhaps the island of Socotra has an additional lure to me as I cannot go there. The people of Yemen are suffering a war, and it is not safe to travel there. The war has been desribed as one of the worst seen by the UN, and has been raging since 2015. People need food and water and medicines desperatly.

You can donate to the Red Cross following one of these links below, to support their work in Yemen:

Alongside dreaming my way on adventerous travels, and whishing for a better world, I did also thourougly explore the larave and exuviae collection at the museum.

These specimen are kept in the original cases that their collectors stored them in, which means a lot of quirky old biscuits tins, candy boxes and clinking and jingling glas tubes. Unfortunately, a lot of the specimens are in bad shape, the ethoanol has evaporated in some cases, leaving a brown mush in the tubes.

The Black Magic tins that Philip Corbet used to store his great number of Pantala flavescens exuviae in, were my favoruites. There was one tin for male exuviae and one for female. All collected at the “Waterworks Tank, Jinja” - which is in Uganda, by lake Victoria.

Philip Corbet was one of the greatest odonatologist of our time. He actually lived not far from me, in Cornwall, untill he sadly passed away age 78 in 2008. He has written the Odonata Bible “Dragonflies; Behaviour and ecology of Odonata”. I always return to that book if I wonder about something odonate. It has everything.

Philip Corbet also new Madame Dragonfly, the one and only Cynthia Longfield (read my blog about her here), and they authored a book together in 1960. It feels like I became a odonatologist just a little bit too late, if I had only been on the scene some 20 years earlier, I could have hang out with them both! Instead, I can only come close to them by the dragonflies they collected.

This has been a rather erratic blog post, but it was also some time ago since I last posted an entry. I will hopefully become more focused in future texts… maybe.