THERE are about 900,000 species of living insects: roughly 80 per cent of all species.

Oxford University Museum of Natural History has at least six million specimens.

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 Reporter Pete Hughes, right, and Dr James Hogan with a display which includes a Tsetse fly collected by Dr David Livingstone 

And, like painting the Forth Bridge, re-housing millions of insects from Victorian cabinets into a useful, modern collection is a task that seemingly never ends.

But that is the challenge that faces the staff of the museum’s entomology department.

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In the words of curator Dr James Hogan: “We’re bringing it out of the 19th century into the 21st.”

The collections are used by scientists to study invasive species, crop pests and climate change, to name but a few.

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 A giant caterpillar from Barbados 

The collection is so vast that those who use it discover specimens they did not realise were there.

Last year work experience student Athena Martin, 17, uncovered a priceless cache of butterflies collected by 19th century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace.

Earlier this year, Dr Hogan found a beetle larvae collected by Victorian missionary Dr David Livingstone.

It was accompanied by handwritten notes describing behaviour that has not been recorded since.

The collection contains the first recorded specimen of the tsetse fly, which spreads deadly sleeping sickness in Africa, also collected by Dr Livingstone.

The department also proudly claims the oldest pinned insect in the world – a Bath white butterfly caught in Cambridge in 1702.

It remains of great importance today for a number of reasons, explained Dr Hogan.

“It is preserved on a pin, which seems mundane today, but that revolutionised entomology.

“Before then, people collected insects but pressed them in books like flowers.

“If you can preserve a specimen on a pin you can rotate it around and see its anatomy.”

The tray of 18th- and 19th-century butterflies in which it sits is also an invaluable snapshot of a rapidly-changing world, he said.

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Some of the butterfly collection, including the oldest known insect specimen – a Bath white, collected in Cambridge in 1702

“The fauna of the British Isles was changing dramatically at that time because of changes in farming practice, industrialisation and the draining of fens.”

Dr Hogan, 43, a father-of-two who lives in Florence Park, Oxford, added: “Most visitors to the museum don’t even know all this is here.

“We couldn’t open it to the public because there’s just so much delicate material, but it’s a shame because there are so many fantastic things to see.”

Ironically, the whole department is permeated by the smell of naphthalene – insecticide used to kill pests that could damage the pinned collections.

That is also the main reason the collections need to be re-housed from dilapidated Victorian wooden cabinets with no pest-proofing into modern metal ones.

How long that takes depends on how many insects there actually are, but as Dr Hogan said: “No one really knows.

“The current estimate is six million, but it could be more.”

One of the reasons the collections are so valuable is that specimens in it may now be extinct in the places they were collected.

Dr Hogan added: “In 100 years’ time these collections will be even more valuable, because a lot of the things here will be even rarer, or extinct.”

Head has lifelong insect fascination

THE amazing thing about insects, according to head of the entomology department Darren Mann, is that “anyone in the UK can make a fascinating discovery about insects if you study them”. 

He said: “You don’t have to be a professor or an academic.”

Mr Mann, head of life collections at the museum, is a prime example. 

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 Head of life collections Darren Mann

When he was given his first job at the museum as a technician in his 20s, he had no qualifications on paper. He did, however, have the largest collection of living cockroaches in the world. 

Now he runs the place, having taken over from Dr George McGavin, who moved on to present insect documentaries on television. 

Mr Mann, 45, who lives in Cowley, said: “I think I was taken on for my enthusiasm. 

“I was just born that way, I’ve always liked insects. 

“They are incredible, the more you learn about them, the more fascinating they become. 

“But they’re also such a useful model for things like climate change, habitat fragmentation and biodiversity.” 

Now, after all his years as an unqualified enthusiast, Mr Mann is about to embark on a PhD next week on one of his favourite insects – the dung beetle.

Alive and kicking

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An Asian forest scorpion, glowing under UV light, looks at its reflection in its tank

  • AN ever-changing menagerie of live insects, spiders and other arachnids greets visitors to the department
  • Current residents include a scorpion which glows under UV light, a ghost mantis, phyllocrania paradoxa, and a tub of Madagascan hissing cockroaches

Factfile

Oxford Mail:

Oxford University Museum of Natural History

  • OXFORD University’s entomological collections were founded by a bequest of specimens left to the museum by the Rev Frederick William Hope in about 1855
  • They were moved to their current home in the late 19th century which was, until then, part of the university’s Radcliffe Science Library
  • The historic department includes the Huxley Room, made world-famous by a debate on the theory of evolution a few years after Darwin’s Origin of Species. Darwin’s good friend Thomas Huxley, nicknamed ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, took on the Bishop of Oxford Samuel Wilberforce there in 1860
  • Dr James Hogan said: “We have visitors who just want to see that room, let alone our insect collections.”


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