Public/Science Dual Purposed Exhibit

During a recent visit to the Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin I was really impressed by a beautiful example of science/public dual usage of an exhibit.  You hear lots of rhetoric about sharing "behind the scenes" research collections with the public but few go beyond creation of a fishbowl with a window on staff preparing fossils or pressing plants.  Such peeks at science as it happens is a great idea, but the reason people should get off the sofa and visit a natural history museum is the see the real thing, to be in the presence of actual specimens that are old, rare, unique, historically or otherwise significant.

The Berlin specimen of Archaeopteryx is fantastically housed and displayed.  It is in a small room that adds to the inescapable sense that you are seeing something truly special.  Crowds wait their turn to step into the small, dimly lit room where the specimen is on display.  The obvious comparison is the chaos in the Louvre as people nudge their way close enough to the Mona Lisa to see her.

The Archaeopteryx is behind bullet proof glass like the U. S. Constitution in Washington, DC, providing exceptional security yet allowing the public to be close enough to examine the impression in detail.  When a scientist visits Berlin to study the specimen the room is secured by a closing door with the scientist inside and then the case opens to allow access to the fossil.  This is a brilliantly designed and constructed exhibit that through its architectural gravitas conveys to the public that this is an exceptionally valuable specimen.  This use of technology to allow the public to be so close to this paleontological treasure while it is not being studied by visiting scientists, yet enable direct access by scientists as needed, is a model that should be carefully studied and adapted to share other rare research specimens with an appreciative and curious public.

ROBOT(e) telemicroscopy unit during final testing in our laboratory before shipment to Europe. PHOTO: Erik Holsinger, Arizona State University).

One Small Step for Engineering, One Giant Leap for Cybertaxonomy


Tim Gostony, the wizard behind the software that operates ROBOT(e), will be in London and Paris next week making final adjustments to the instruments that I sat up there a couple of months ago, and the third unit was set up at the Smithsonian just a couple of weeks ago.  Following Tim's hardware and software upgrades we will do final testing of the units and then make plans for an official launch of the network.

ROBOT(e) is an acronym for Remotely Operable Benchmarking Of Types (Entomology), our first generation of functional remotely operable digital microscopes.  The idea is simple.  At a pre-arranged date and hour a curator places a type or rare specimen in the pin holder.  That's it until the specimen needs to be returned to the collection.  The remote user logs in and remotely turns on the electrical supply for the camera, lift, five microstep motors, and lamps.  The user has total control and can manipulate the specimen on multiple axes:  spinning 360 degrees, tilting (to see ventral surface) 180 degrees, moving on X or Y axis, and raising or lowering camera on Z axis.  The user chooses between auto and manual focus and with the click of a button can take a high resolution image of the specimen that can be saved both to a local hard disk and backup up to the host museum's hard disk.

Access to type specimens continues to be a major bottleneck to progress in species exploration and nomenclature.  More and more databases rely on Linnaean binominals as unique identifiers for species, yet types are not consulted as often as they should be to keep pace with advancing concepts of species.  The idea, of course, is that over time a growing archive of images will obviate the need to handle types either in person or with such a remote instrument... but that is a long way off at this date.

Three instruments may sound like a modest start, but by placing them in the world's three largest insect collections students and researchers around the world have potential access to more than 600,000 insect type specimens representing a very serious percentage of insect species.  They also open the possibility for online teaching using the most rare material and virtual repatriation of types, allowing scientists and students in developing nations of origin to access, study, and photograph type and rare specimens collected within their borders.

ROBOT(e) could easily be modified to handle a wide variety of biological, anthropological, and geological museum objects with just a small amount of development money.  We received a generous grant from the Virginia M. Ullman Foundation that fully funded the software development and construction of the prototype.  The final three instruments were funded by the IISE and with generous in-kind donation of engineering expertise, time, and parts by Visionary Digital, Inc.  Without this amazingly generous donation the final instruments could not have been built.

The network and first generation instruments are a proof of concept and we are already working on ideas for enhancements such as enhanced light control to create shadows, automated image montages, a measuring function, and 3D imaging, just to name a few.  We are hoping to next find an investor or investors that make these add on features possible and that allow us to take the next step into cybertaxonomy.

We have been working on a concept for a truly robotic imaging system for types.  Without special knowledge of the taxon, a curator or technician places a type in the instrument and presses a button.  Fifty images are automatically taken and stitched together to form a 3D, zoom-able, rotatable "e-type."  This high throughput instrument is necessary to deal with the back log of insect type specimens estimated at 2.5 to 3 million in number.  We calculate that fewer than two dozen such instruments could generate 1 million e-types in five years... and faster, of course, with more units.  Several such units would be needed in the large museums and others would be nomads going museum to museum.  When the backlog is caught up, the instruments would be permanently housed in regional e-typification centers where individual taxonomists and smaller institutions could send types to be digitized.

A discussion of how ROBOT(e) fits into a wider strategy to deal with insect type specimens (that are, incidentally, half of all types) can be found in our recent paper: 

Wheeler, Q.D. et al. 2012: Mapping the biosphere: exploring species to understand the origin, organization and sustainability of biodiversity. Systematics and biodiversity, 10(1): 1-20.
doi: 10.1080/14772000.2012.665095

A free PDF can be downloaded from:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14772000.2012.665095

Botanists have been leading the charge and have a great deal of the digitization of herbarium type specimens completed.  Once the insects are done, the herbaria plus hundreds of other efforts around the world would bring us closer to the vision of having all types digitized than could have been imagined prior to cybertaxonomic instrumentation.

The Same Old New Species

From time to time I receive irate feedback from a reader of my column, New to Nature, in London's The Observer newspaper concerning my use of the phrase "new species."  The reader notes that the species is not new but rather new to science.  The gentle reader is, of course, absolutely correct.  For the record I accept the results of Francesco Redi's experiments and I reject spontaneous generation as well as rancid meat.  While I have seen examples of small, isolated populations of insects that seem to have attained full species status since the retreat of the Wisconsin glaciation cycle ca. 12.000 years ago, it is the case that most species require hundreds of thousands to millions of years to reach species status.  Thus, once and for all, I use the phrase "new species" merely as a shorthand for the less alphabetically parsimonious "species new to science."

The wrath of readers would be far better directed to those who persist in wasting perfectly good binominals on species-in-the-making (that is, the dreaded and always to be avoided subspecies) rather than demonstrably full species and those who would use the word species for mere arbitrary, average genetic distances such as DNA barcodes.  These are worse than neo-Creation, out-of-the-blue, species claims for they are not species at all.  It is more productive to argue over the origins of species than to dilute the concept to meaninglessness.

A great deal of the plight of taxonomy arises from a confusion between the study of species and the study of species-in-the-making (commonly known as population biology) with the implicit supposition that species are not objective entities in nature.  They are only subjective to the extent that one fails to distinguish between the objects of study of pop bio and taxonomy.

Much to the chagrin of the more critical readers I shall continue to refer to new species under the possibly overly charitable view that even a minimal understanding of evolution will lead to the conclusion that I mean species new to science.