Behind the Scenes at the Museum
"We call these the alcoholics" says Rad, a senior specialist in the ichthyology department at the American Museum of Natural History. He's holding up a specimen jar filled with pale dead fish in a caramel colored liquid. The shelves behind us are stacked with bottled samples and our group of fifteen are gathered around a large stainless steel countertop in the middle of the room.
Alcohol evaporates at any temperature, Rad explains, which makes it a good way to desiccate specimens. I think about the wine I drank last night. Once the fish are dehydrated, they are preserved in formaldehyde or given to a colony of beetles who clean the body, leaving the skeleton ready for analysis. We, the guests in the ichthyology department, glance at one another with uncertain smiles.
Rad has been in the job nearly thirty years. At this point, I wonder if he is seeing how gullible we are, but it turns out beetles that eat dried organic matter are indeed the perfect bone-cleaners, faster and more efficient than any chemical alternatives and are used in lots of museums for exactly that reason. We aren't shown where they live. A colony might last ten years, Rad tells us. The ones at the American Museum of Natural History have a direct lineage with colonies used at the museum in the 1960s so they are clearly well fed and happy. There are a few nervous questions about having beetles as colleagues and how the colonies are contained but rather than being the piranhas of the insect world Rad assures us that these particular beetles only like dried organic matter, like dead skin. While that might stretch to leather, he says the beetles would be less keen on wood than say their termite cousins. Anyway, he tells us, there's sticky tape across the threshold of the door to stop beetles escaping.
Rad explains how specimens are prepared and catalogued and how material is loaned to other institutions. The department has more than 2 million specimens of marine and freshwater fish. He opens up a metal container the size of a chest freezer containing two coelacanth preserved in alcohol. I remember staring for hours at a much smaller coelacanth specimen at the Natural History Museum in London. It is famous because it was considered extinct and only known by its fossilized remains until one of them was actually caught in trawling nets off South Africa in 1938. The fish charts a line between sea and land dwelling animals, perhaps one of our most ancient living ancestors. The fish we gather round to photograph came to the museum in 1962 from the Comoro Islands in the Indian Ocean.
A scientist once asked to take a sample from a coelacanth at a museum in Paris, Rad tells us, and when the museum refused the researcher made the same request to the American Museum of Natural History. The museum agreed, and provided a sample from the coelacanth they had. It turned out that tests suggested the fish, which was thought to be a male, was in fact female and carrying pups. Four pups were removed. One is on display at the museum, one was dissected for samples, and the others were either donated or traded for other specimens. The Parisians, realizing perhaps that they missed a trick, had their fish tested and it was also found to be carrying pups. Suddenly two specimens became eight. There must be a fable in there somewhere but it's time to leave and we are ushered through the double doors, back into the well-lit corridors of the museum armed with some of the lesser known stories of life and death from the American Museum of Natural History.