NEWS

ULM to divest millions of fish, plant specimens

Bonnie Bolden
bbolden@thenewsstar.com

The University of Louisiana at Monroe announced Tuesday that it plans to rehome two of the largest collections of fish and plant specimens in the state.

Jars containing snake specimens sit on shelves in Brown Stadium at the University of Louisiana at Monroe on Wednesday, March 29, 2017. The research collection contains approximately 6 million specimens, including reptiles, fish, insects and plants. Neil Douglas, an expert on fish in Louisiana and biology professor at the university, collected the majority of the fish specimens, starting in the 1960s. "This is a history from 1962 until today of what fish were found where," Dennis Bell, the Collections Manager of the herbarium, said.

Vice President for Academic Affairs Eric Pani said the collections are an important resource to the university, and they take finding someone to house them seriously. Because most of the collections are from this region, the university wants to find someone in Louisiana who will take on the specimens. Several offers have been made, including some by in-state institutions.

Thomas Sasek, a biology professor at the university and the curator of the ULM Natural History Museum, said the collections are the product of two men's 40- to 50-year careers.

“It’s the heritage of the university. There are 15,000 biology majors who collected this stuff," Dennis Bell, collection manager for the herbarium, said. He elaborated that more than 15,000 students have probably contributed to the collection at this point. The names of each student is included with the specimens he or she collected.

Neil Douglas compiled the fish collection, which consists of at 3 million to 6 million specimens in jars, including multiples of some species.

“This is a history from 1962 until today of what fish were found where," Bell said, referring to the millions of specimens collected by Douglas and his students starting in the early 1960s. Most of the fish were collected in the South.

Dale Thomas created the herbarium, which has about 500,000 items and is the biggest in the state. It's larger than all the other collections in Louisiana combined and is estimated to be the fifth largest in the South. Bell said Thomas collected about 170,00 specimens himself, and the university has traded samples with more than 200 institutions worldwide, giving the collection global relevance. The collection is kept in 330 cabinets.

Research collections were placed at Brown Stadium three or four years ago, Sasek said, with long-term plans to move them back to the main part of the campus.

"The problem is they're so big that it requires a lot of space," Sasek said. "Because the fish are in alcohol, they have to have a sprinkler system. And then the plants aren't in alcohol, but they need to be in air-conditioning and all that. It can't be humid. ...  That space was adequate, it just, you know, was inconvenient and kind of cramped to squeeze everything in there. But eventually it was supposed to come back, and so now, they're not able to bring them back onto the main campus. ... With the renovation at Brown for the track team, they have no place to put it, so they decided to give it away rather than keep it."

Dennis Bell, collections manager for the herbarium, reads the label on a jar of fish specimens in storage in Brown Stadium at the University of Louisiana at Monroe on Wednesday, March 29, 2017. The specimens were collected by Neil Douglas, an ichthyologist, and his students starting in the early 1960s. Each specimen jar is labeled with the name of the student who collected it, along with information about the species and where it was found. "It's the heritage of the university. There are 15,000 biology majors who collected this stuff," Bell said. He estimated that the number of students who contributed to the collection was probably higher than 15,000.

In a statement released Tuesday, Pani said the university plans to rehome the collections by mid-July, when construction will need to begin on Brown Stadium.

"The research collections of plants, fish, amphibian and reptiles have not been used by our students and faculty much in the last few years, except for instructional purposes. Research use has largely been confined to people outside ULM from loans we have made to them and visits they have made here. However, we have still had to maintain the collection. I have concluded that the scientific integrity of the museum’s research collection will be better preserved at another institution that has the resources needed to house and care for it adequately. While this decision in not my ideal, it makes the most sense for preserving this important resource. The ULM administration will do everything in its power to find the right fit for the collection which we hope will be in Louisiana or at least in the southeastern United States," Pani said Wednesday.

Sasek had a $500,000 grant to digitize the herbarium and put it online through the National Science Foundation.

Dennis Bell, Collections Manager of the Herbarium at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, displays a pressed Tragopogon, or oyster plant, stored in Brown Stadium on Wednesday, March 29, 2017. Plant taxonomist Dale Thomas, who retired from the university in 2003, collected approximately 170,000 plant specimens throughout his career, Bell said. The university has exchanged specimens with more than 200 herbaria all over the world.

"So they appreciate the importance of the herbarium. To our university, I guess that's not considered research, but the tremendous value to make it available to the whole world, you know, by being online and so I guess they don't see as much value in that. I don't know," he said.

His work to digitize the collection spanned all 1 million specimens in the state, starting in 2009. That part of the work took four years. For the past three years, he's worked with a smaller grant to complete the computerization of the digital files, which is ongoing. The project has not yet been published because the work is incomplete.

Sasek is concerned that he could lose the last 1.5 years of funding if the money moves with the collection. He's working with the data, not specimens, at this point, but he's concerned that there will be a technical reason for the grant to be canceled.

Color-coded folders containing pressed and dried plant specimens sit on shelves in a cabinet in Brown Stadium at the University of Louisiana at Monroe on Wednesday, March 29, 2017. Specimens in yellow folders were collected in North America. Specimens in green folders were collected in the 50 states. Specimens in blue folders were collected in other countries. The university has traded plant specimens with more than 200 herbaria around the world. Herbaria are essentially archives of plant specimens.

"I've never had to cancel a grant, so I just don't know," he said. "I'm in a panic, besides the other news, not to lose that funding."

Ultimately, the lack of staff to work with natural history or similar research collections is widespread.

Bell said maintaining the collections requires diligent effort. Jars have to be checked for evaporation and topped off with fluids, and if insects get into plant specimens, the materials have to be frozen and the cabinet fumigated.

"We haven't been very active, as it was in the past, because we don't have faculty that are working on the collection as much. So it's kind of a circular thing that if it doesn't get used then we can't hire anyone to work in that area, and so then it doesn't get used. And it looks like it's not important. That's just the reality all around the country. Many places have switched emphasis and so natural history collections don't have a lot of faculty working on them, but we have been active," Sasek said.

Sasek said they've had dozens and dozens of offers from some of the most prestigious organizations in the country to take the collections.

"Our plan, if we have to donate it, is to try to keep it intact. ... and hopefully go in state so it's not lost to the state," he said.

Pani met with leaders of the College of Arts, Education and Sciences last week. The CAES manages the research collections, which are under the university's Museum of Natural History. He met with them again this week and asked that the specimens, except for a teaching collection, be donated and relocated. A 48-hour deadline was set for CAES staff to find a place on campus in hopes of retaining the collections.

Pani said the 48-hour goal was only to find a place on campus for long-term storage of the collection. If that cannot be accomplished or another organization won't take the specimens, he said, destroying them seemed like the only alternative. Several offers to take on the collections have been made since that discussion.

Thomas Sasek, Associate Professor of Biology and head of the Museum of Natural History at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, looks into a tank of saltwater fish at the museum, which is located in Hanna Hall, on Wednesday, March 29, 2017. The university announced Tuesday that it will divest from a research collection containing between 3 million and 6 million specimens of fish, plants and insects that are stored on the ground floor of Brown Stadium. The Museum of Natural History, which is open to the public, will not be affected.

Support for keeping the collection, and the museum, has boomed since Sasek posted about needing to find a home for the collections on the University of Louisiana Monroe Museum of Natural History Facebook page on Tuesday. The original post stated that ULM faculty were told if they couldn't find someone to take the collection, it would be destroyed in July.

Before the original post, about 375 people liked the museum's page. Since then, the page has been liked by about 300 more people, that number keeps climbing, and the message has gained national recognition.

The threat of destroying the collection is what has caused the biggest uproar. Without that, Sasek said, very few people would have paid attention. Sasek said he and other staff members heard about the meeting second hand through their boss. They would have clarified the issue if provided a chance.

"There would have been a lot of outrage at, you know, closing the collections, but it wouldn't have blown up to 100,000 views on Facebook. ... in my opinion," Sasek said.

The professor said several people can post on behalf of the page and because administrators can see each others' names, they can forget it's effectively anonymous when it's posted. Because that page is considered part of the university, he said he was told to take down the original post and rewrite it Tuesday night.

Taxidermied animals are reflected in a glass window of a display case containing fossils at the University of Louisiana at Monroe's Museum of Natural History on Wednesday, March 29, 2017. The university announced Tuesday that it would divest its collection of nearly 6 million plant and animal specimens that are stored in Brown Stadium in order to renovate the track. The collection in the Museum of Natural History is located in Hanna Hall and open to the public.

Pani said some posts on social media seemed to imply the collection would be destroyed soon, which is not the case, or that the entire museum would be eliminated. A proposed museum expansion, he said, has been delayed for two years while another project is completed.

"It would be an honor for the university to donate the collection to an organization with the space to preserve and display it, and we fully expect to find such a facility as soon as possible," Pani said Tuesday.

Sasek said the news that the expansion is delayed, not canceled, was new.

Follow Bonnie Bolden on Twitter @Bonnie_Bolden_ and on Facebook at http://on.fb.me/1RtsEEP. Hannah Baldwin contributed to this report.

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