Amateur Lepidopterists and Museums: Past and Present Online

Event description

People have been collecting and preserving insect specimens for centuries; butterflies and moths have been particularly popular for this endeavor due to their often-striking appearances. The majority of digitized butterfly and moth specimens in US institutions were collected by amateur lepidopterists, not professional entomologists.

However, there has been a steep decrease in the acquisition and donation of specimens to these collections since the 1990s. Reasons for this decline include the availability of photography and other non-specimen based recording methods and lack of funding for teaching natural history skills to new generations.

Whether or not this holds in other countries and for other taxa remains to be seen, though anecdotal evidence suggests that it does. This talk will focus on existing findings for US Lepidoptera collectors and current work focusing on the UK Lepidoptera collection of Natural History Museum, London. Erica Fischer is a PhD student affiliated with the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Department of History at King's College London.

Their research focuses on interdisciplinary uses of museum label data, especially combining specimen information with other written sources. They have an MS in Entomology from Michigan State University.

This talk is online and Zoom login details will be sent out two hours before the event start time.