The Backbone

A New Face: Esther Langan, Division of Mammals

 

Esther Langan, new staff member to the Division of Mammals

Please join us in welcoming Esther Langan to the Division of Mammals. She was offered the job of Museum Specialist a few weeks after her interview and accepted immediately. Esther comes to us from our very own National Zoo where she had been a biotechnician in the pathology lab since 2006.  A graduate of the University of Florida at Gainesville, where she earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, she also has six years of experience working for the Florida Museum of Natural History.

 

SITES exhibit, X-Ray Vision: Fish Inside Out, Moves On

 

Radiograph of a Viper moray eel. Radiograph by Sandra Raredon.

X-ray Vision: Fish Inside Out, an exhibition from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES), recently completed its six-month run in the temporary gallery in the Sant Ocean Hall. The exhibit, co-curated by the Fish Division’s Sandra J. Raredon, who prepared the radiographs and photographs, and Lynne R. Parenti, who wrote the text, premiered at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, in mid-2011. 
The exhibition features 40 stunning black-and-white digital prints of fish x-rays.  Arranged in evolutionary sequence, the x-rays give a tour through the long stream of fish evolution. In addition to the 10 SITES venues in the US, the exhibit has also been recreated for the Falmouth Aquarium, England.  The popular exhibit was the first at NMNH in which all the species have a link to a page in the Encyclopedia of Life which may be accessed at http://eol.org/collections/14770

 

Staff from the National Zoological Museum, Copenhagen visit the Division of Mammals

Earlier this summer osteo-preparator John Ososky hosted two colleagues from the National Zoological Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark (ZMUC), Abdi Hadayat, and Kristian Gregersen.  The National Zoological Museum is currently constructing a new whale hall and sought the expertise of Department of Vertebrate Zoology staff John Ososky and Charley Potter in marine mammal specimen preparation and collections management practices. 

Integrated Pest Management and Herp Collecting in Oklahoma

Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History

After it opened twelve years ago, the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History (SNOMNH) asked Jeremy Jacobs (Division of Amphibians and Reptiles) to provide an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) assessment of the new building.  This year, administrators at Sam Noble decided it was time to follow up on that assessment and asked Jeremy once again to assess their IPM program and determine what, if anything, needed tweaking. 

Speeding up Scientific Identification of Fishes using Facebook®

 

Freshwater puffer fish, Colomesus asellus, collected in Guyana. Photo by Whit Bronaugh.

It is not every day that social media comes to the rescue of ichthyologists. In early 2011, that is just what happened to a Smithsonian (NMNH)-sponsored team of researchers, led by Brian Sidlauskas of Oregon State University, who were faced with the daunting task of identifying over 5,000 specimens collected during the first survey of the fish diversity in the Cuyuni River of Guyana. To obtain an export permit, the government of Guyana required that all specimens be identified-- a tall order in a week’s time for a small team without access to the necessary literature.  Faced with this overwhelming timeline, Brian and his team posted images of the specimens on Facebook and sent out a plea for help to an international network of colleagues with expertise in the South American fish fauna.

 

World Congress of Herpetology (with Ichthyologists!)

The World Congress of Herpetology invited the world's herpetologists, as well as ichthyologists meeting with the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists and the American Elasmobranch Society, to convene at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, from 8 through 14 August, 2012.  The Department of Vertebrate Zoology was well-represented by the divisions of Amphibians and Reptiles (Kevin de Queiroz, Roy McDiarmid, Dan Moen and Jeremy Jacobs) and Fishes (Bruce Collette, Dave Johnson, Ai Nonaka, Lynne Parenti, Dave Smith and Inci Bowman).

Deep-Reef Fish Collections: One fish, two fish, new fish, new fish

Curasub collecting specimens. Photo by Barry Brown

In August 2012, Carole Baldwin (Division of Fishes) and her team continued their exploration of Curacao’s deep reefs with the Curasub. The five-person submersible, based in Curacao in the Southern Caribbean, allows researchers to collect reef species to a depth of 1,000 ft (ca. 305 m.).  In the second year of fieldwork for the Deep Reef Observation Project (DROP), Carole, Ross Robertson (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama), and Lee Weigt, Amy Driskell and Cristina Castillo (LAB) collected, photographed, sampled tissues and preserved fish specimens from deep-reef depths in a small, ca. 50-hectare area adjacent to the Curacao Sea Aquarium.

Tom Strang, Integrated Pest Management expert, visits NMNH

Tom Strang, an internationally recognized expert on Integrated Pest Management (IPM), recently visited NMNH at the request of the museum’s Collections Program to consult on our IPM guidelines and current practices. 

Squirrels of the World book is launched

 

Dr. Richard Thorington, Jr. (seated), James Whatton and Paula Bohaska

During a recent Mammals Division weekly coffee hour, Richard Thorington, Jr. (with assistant Paula Bohaska) and co-author Jim Whatton (Division of Birds) celebrated the August, 2012 publication by Johns Hopkins University Press of Squirrels of the World, the first modern, comprehensive examination of all 285 species of the family Sciuridae worldwide.  Six years in the making, the book provides a detailed look at each species of ground squirrel, tree squirrel, flying squirrel, marmot, prairie dog, and chipmunk through a species account that describes distinguishing characteristics, reviews the ecology and natural history, details conservation status and threats, and lists the currently recognized subspecies for each of the 285 species.  The striking tome includes 285 colorful distribution maps, skull images for each genus, and photographs of 230 species, providing many visually stunning glimpses of rarely seen squirrels.