Evan Waite - Transcript

New Species Podcast

00:00

Zoe: In part one of Taxonomy Basics, Evan Waite from Arizona State University teaches us all
about collecting entomological specimens. From which traps to use, to tips on sharing your
collection with others, Evan gives us all the details with some great stories along the way. Evan is
a coleopterist and PhD candidate at Arizona State University. His work focuses on ground beetles,
but he's broadly interested in beetle diversity and has a personal collection that includes over
2,000 specimens from across the arthropod world.

Zoe: His collecting and taxonomic work have taken him across the country to many unique
habitats, as well as a variety of entomological collections. Taxonomy Basics is a three-part series
on the basic components of species description, including collecting, preserving, and describing
new species. This series focuses on entomological specimens, but has concepts that work across
disciplines. Listen in as Evan Waite, Ashley Wiffin, and Mark Milne share their guides and discuss
important concepts in taxonomy, curation, and beyond.

[bright, tech-y introductory music]

Zoe: Welcome to the New Species Podcast. I’m your host, Zoe Albion. On this podcast we learn
about recent discoveries of species that are new to science, but not necessarily new to nature.
We ask scientists how they find these new species and why they matter. We learn what makes a
new species, and hear some behind-the-scenes stories along the way. So join us as we explore
the biodiversity of our planet and the scientists who help us better understand it.

[music fades out]

Zoe: Welcome to the New Species Podcast. Welcome to the New Species podcast. I'm your host,
Zoe Albion. And today I'm here with Evan Waite, a PhD candidate at Arizona State University.
He's here today to tell us about starting an entomological collection, as well as the basics of
collecting. Welcome, Evan. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Evan: Hi Zoe, thanks for having me.

Zoe: Can you start off by sort of introducing yourself and the kinds of collecting you do?

Evan: Sure. Like you said, my name is Evan Waite and I'm a PhD candidate at Arizona State
University. My work focuses primarily on the group Carabidae, the ground beetles. And so through
that, I do a lot of black lighting and pitfall trapping, which we will elaborate more on slightly later,
but my interests generally lie within all beetles. So I do a little bit of everything to collect the vast
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 but my interests generally lie within all beetles. So I do a little bit of everything to collect the vast
diversity that's there.

Zoe: I know some of the collecting you do is for your research, and you also do a little bit of
personal collecting, right?

Evan: Yes. Luckily for me, those overlap quite a bit. So I do have my personal research collection,
and then I have specimens that I'm using specifically for the groups that I'm working on for my
dissertation.

Zoe: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the personal collecting side. Do you remember the
first specimen you collected or sort of what made you decide to start your own collection?

Evan: That is a fantastic question. And yes, I do remember the first specimen that I've ever
collected. So I got my start in entomology as a freshman at the University of Florida. And I was a
zoology major at the time. And just looking to get involved in some way, I started volunteering at
the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History. And so
my first foray into entomology was spreading

03:35
butterflies and moths for like six to eight hours a week. And while I was working there, one day I
left my dorm and there was a gigantic imperial moth on the wall outside. And I hadn't ever
collected any specimens for myself yet but I decided that if it was still there when I got back from
the store, I was going to collect that specimen and-

04:03
It was still there, so I grabbed some pins from work the next week and yeah, that was the start of
my entomology collection. A little moment of Lepidoptera destiny. How big is your collection now?
So right now I digitally manage my collection, which again we can talk a little bit more about later,
and I checked the numbers right before we started. I'm at about 2000 specimens fully digitized
and about 600 species.

04:33
1500 of those 2000 specimens are ground beetles, largely from North America, but I have a few
from all over. But including all of my yet to be determined stuff, I would imagine my collection is
probably between five and seven thousand specimens. I think that's really impressive, especially
for like less than a decade of collecting. Yes, it started.

05:00
I started my collection in, it would have been 2014. So I think this year would in fact be my 10th
year of entomology. Oh man. So yeah, that's pretty impressive for basically 10 years of collecting.
I've been fortunate enough to start learning insects in Florida, which is a great place to collect.
And then, uh, now living in Arizona, another place that people flock to, um, for the collecting
specifically.

05:29
So I've been really lucky to move around and kind of travel a bit since I've started doing this. So I
have specimens from all over the United States, but I've also built a network of people that we will
trade specimens. So I have some stuff from the Pacific Northwest, quite a bit of it actually, but I've
never been up there to collect personally. So that's another way that you can get specimens
besides actually collecting them yourself.

05:56
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 05:56
Yeah, like a personal collection doesn't have to be just the specimens that you yourself collected.
Right, yeah. The way I used to collect would be even if, say, you and I were out on a collecting trip
together and you found a cool beetle that I wanted, I wouldn't take it. Because in my mind, like, it
could have flown away by the time that I walked over there and I was really, really set on it being
things that I...

06:26
personally collected. But once I started actively working on a group where I needed more
reference material of things that I hadn't seen before and I was getting specimens sent to me from
all over, I gave that up pretty quick. And so now it's just useful to have what is essentially a
reference library of specimens in the group that I work on.

06:54
reference collection, and also, you know, maybe just for aesthetic purposes or to pursue a
particular curiosity. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that, like, collections can look very different
from one another. What would you consider a collection? I have always been the kind of person to
keep lists and catalog things that I've seen, you know.

07:22
I was definitely into the whole Pokemon thing as a kid, not saying that I grew out of that at any
point, but I love biodiversity, and a collection is really just a snapshot of biodiversity at certain
places, at certain times. You know, until we perfect time travel, you can't ever go back and collect
at a certain place at a certain time ever again.

07:51
So the reason that I'm okay with having a little bit of a backlog of things that I haven't quite worked
up yet is because I know those specimens are still valuable, even though I haven't exactly gotten
around to them yet. If somebody listening to this episode wants to start their own collection right
now, what's the starter kit? What do they need?

08:18
This could go a lot of different ways. You can get really into it and get all the super specialized
equipment right away. But really the four things that you need to start an insect collection are your
insect specimen, insect pins, a collection box of some sort with a tight ceiling lid, and then
collecting information. So where, when, and how that specimen was acquired.

08:47
I think to varying degrees of ease can be found on the internet or just around your house. I've
seen many interesting containers used for collecting and for storing specimens. Yeah, I never
leave the house now without a vial of some sort in my pocket, but I've also definitely dumped out
my water bottle to shove something in it when I didn't have a vial on me. So...

09:13
You can use just about anything to acquire the specimens, but really keeping that collecting
information with it is one of the most important steps of building a collection. Yeah, so tell us a little
bit about the collecting information. What do you need to include and why is it important? Sure. So
in an insect collection, under every single specimen, you have your little tiny piece of paper that
tells you where, when...

09:41
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 09:41
how and by who that specimen was acquired. This information is really important because if that
specimen ever gets separated from that information, the scientific value goes down to basically
nothing. There are a lot of species across the world that look very similar to one another. So
knowing whether or not something was collected in the Eastern United States versus

10:11
South Africa, for instance, that can really help inform what species you're looking at. And
nowadays when you have GPS units basically in your phone, you can get down to an exact rock
essentially in terms of specificity. And that helps with finding things that are restricted to certain
microhabitats. So maybe something about that.

10:39
area in particular leads to a specimen being more likely to be collected there. So the more
information that you can fit on that label, really the better it is for use by other scientists. Yeah,
there are lots of different ways to use that data. And in part two of this series, where we talk about
curation, we're going to talk a lot more about the use and the preservation of that data, because
as you said, it is really important.

11:09
on those labels is the way the specimen was collected. Can you talk a little bit about the types of
collecting? Yeah, absolutely. So when I teach my general entomology class, we usually go over
three different types of collecting, which are just very broad categories. You have what we call
active collecting, where you are out there doing something in order to obtain those specimens. So
that would be.

11:38
chasing a butterfly with a net, flipping rocks or logs, just picking things off of plants that you see.
So those would all be active methods. You have passive methods like trapping, things like pitfall
traps, malaise traps, any of those sorts of things where you can deploy them, leave them out for
an extended period of time where you don't actually have to be there to collect the specimens,
and then come back and get them later.

12:07
And then the third category is light trapping. I'm sure everyone listening has encountered insects
flying around a streetlight or the light outside of their house. And so entomologists exploit that by
going and putting big bright lights out with a white sheet in habitat that they're looking to collect in.
And that way all the specimens come to you rather than you having to go find the specimens. So.

12:35
That's kind of a mix because the light brings them in like a trap. But in order to collect them, you
do have to actively be there unless you've set it up for some way for there to be automatic
collection. I definitely recommend for people who might be involved in the entomology community,
but have never collected before, to tag along on a light trapping trip. I think any collecting trip is
wonderful, but my experience with light traps is just...

13:05
It's basically like a several hour moment of wonder where you just have this feed of interesting
and oftentimes like new or unfamiliar things. Evan, you have much more experience light trapping
than me. Maybe it's a little more boring as time goes on. No, you're shaking your head no. No, I
think that light trapping is always exciting. Part of that being insect collecting is so imprecise.
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 13:34
at times where when you collect something one year you might go back the same day the
following year and it won't be there. Or maybe one night in a collecting trip you are inundated with
a certain species but then you don't see it again. And we don't really have a lot of explanation a lot
of the time for why that happens. And I've never done this to really back up this thing that I say a
lot.

14:03
but I say this all the time. If you were to set up a light collecting sheet in the same place every
night for a full year, you would find something new every single night. Just the way that
seasonality works and population fluctuations happen. No matter how many times I go out and
collect, it is still always exciting. And like you said, taking...

14:32
new people out collecting. One of my favorite things about being able to teach the general
entomology class here is getting students out on their first collecting trip, because almost always
they just say, there are more bugs on this sheet than I've seen in my entire life. And so many
different kinds, and it's all it's always just very exciting. Another reason I love light trapping is

15:00
When you encounter the insects, they're alive. I think sometimes it's really hard to be an
entomologist because it does include a tremendous amount of killing things and things that you
are personally interested in and curious about. And of course, if you're collecting via light trap,
you're gonna have to kill the specimens at the end of it unless you're just observing. But I really
enjoy this little snippet of behavior.

15:29
Yeah, that's a really good point. I agree you do get to see a lot of really cool stuff. It's not always,
just given the circumstances, I would never classify it as like quote-unquote natural behaviors, but
you do get to see things kind of play out on a stage, if you will, like on your white sheet with the
light. Getting to see mantis flies preying on

15:57
little tiny moths or seeing, you know, a praying mantis or a beetle mating on the sheet. It's not
exactly how it would happen in nature, but it's certainly a lot easier for you to observe when you
have this opportunity to see all of these live insects. So light trapping is very general, like you
were saying. In many cases,

16:21
Entomologists have to use very particular collecting techniques if they want a very particular
target. Can you talk a little bit about what those might be? Yeah, sure. With collecting, there are
about as many ways to do it as there are insects to collect. Like you said, light trapping is very
general. You get a lot of different things.

16:50
light traps, but things like dragonflies for instance, they do occasionally show up, but this is not a
really efficient way to collect dragonflies. Dragonflies typically are collected during the day while
you're out wading around near water with a big net, and then you just take a swipe at them as
they come by. And there are so many inc...

17:19
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incredibly specific collecting techniques that we could do a whole series on that alone. But for
instance, if you're interested in dung beetles, oftentimes you have to acquire dung to bait your
traps with. If you're after longhorn beetles or some of the other wood boring things, they make
pheromones that you can put out to specifically attract them.

17:48
there is at least one that I know of, the Idaho Ice Cave Beetle, which is a little Lyodid in the north
that is restricted to ice caves. There's another Lyodid that I've collected that only is available on
living or freshly deceased beavers. So in order to collect that one, you have to somehow gain
access to a living or recently deceased beaver. So.

18:19
There are a ton of ways to collect and there are plenty that I'm not going over right now just
because I don't really use them personally. But if you're targeting something very specific, you
might have to do a very specific thing to find that organism. Your anecdote makes me wonder how
many different opportunities people have every day that entomologists would like kill for. People
who monitor roadkill, for example.

18:48
might have access to so many very interesting invertebrates that they just are not aware of other
than probably wanting to avoid them. Yeah, we can keep this in or not, doesn't really matter, but
when I was taking my medical and veterinary entomology class at the University of Florida, we
had an arrangement with the local fish and wildlife office. So we went in and we were able

19:19
dead Florida panthers for fleas and ticks. We were able to, you know, dig through a roadkill
alligator to see what was still in there. Endangered birds that had been hit by cars, we were able
to collect feather mites off of all these incredibly specific things to access insects. And the fish and
wildlife people definitely hooked us up in that regard. That's awesome.

19:48
So we've been going over these techniques kind of briefly. There are a lot of great guidelines
online. If you're interested in collecting using some of these techniques, I can add some links in
the description. I would love to talk to you also about the sort of pitfalls, the things to avoid while
collecting, because I think that in my experience is where institutional knowledge comes in a lot. It
can really affect your collecting experience. So yeah, could you just

20:17
of the things not to do. Sure. One of the big things is knowing where and when you are allowed to
collect. Chris Grinter from the California Academy of Sciences has his website that kind of
outlines the collecting permit process for different areas in the US and around the world, and I
would like to stress, as I'm sure he would like me to as well stress, that is not gospel.

20:46
look into where and when you're allowed to collect, but his website has been incredibly helpful.
And especially starting off, you don't think about the fact that there might be regulations on where
and what and how you can collect. So at least in the US, which is where most of my collecting
experience has been, private land is okay as long as you have

21:16
permission from the landowner. So if you have a farm or something like that, you can always go
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 permission from the landowner. So if you have a farm or something like that, you can always go
and ask. And it is always, always, always great to get this sort of thing in writing. Public lands,
Bureau of Land Management is generally okay. National and state parks are generally off limits
without a collecting permit.

21:43
while national and state forests are okay. When in doubt, the best option is to always ask and
again, get something in writing that somebody told you that you were allowed to do this or not. But
that's something that we have to stress to our students a lot of the time because they don't know
that, in Arizona for instance, like, oh, I didn't know that you couldn't collect at the Grand Canyon,
but that is a huge no-no. So...

22:13
That's definitely one of the things to keep in mind is just legality of where and what you're doing.
This goes for the United States. You and I are both in the United States. There are also a lot of
regulations and expectations around specimens crossing borders sometimes. So when in doubt,
ask. And I think this is a very important area to do your research in, especially if you're going
somewhere that you're not familiar with or you don't know anyone who's already collected in that
area.

22:44
Yeah, and these regulations can change rather quickly. So someone, if you have a colleague or
whatever that went to a certain area two or three years ago, the process might be different now.
And even if the specimens are dead, there are collecting permits, export permits, import permits
that you should be taking into consideration when doing this. So if you are traveling somewhere,

23:14
and are intending to collect insects while you are there, you should start at least six months to a
year ahead of time trying to figure out what is required and if you would be able to do that while
you're there. Yeah, and it's also good to be prepared as far as collecting goes. Yeah, definitely.
Depending where you are, you will find different hazards in the field, I guess.

23:44
quite a few of them. During the summer, you know, our 120 degree temperatures, you need to
have more water than you think you could ever possibly drink with you. We also have rattlesnakes
and cacti and a lot of other plants that can poke and stab and prod you. On the complete opposite
end of the spectrum, you have places up north where, you know, you can get frostbite. That is not
something that I...

24:13
think about in my day to day here in Arizona. But I did visit a friend in Wyoming in March of 2018, I
believe, and I was out trying to collect snow scorpion flies and I was not adequately prepared for
the cold. Probably one of my closest calls in the field of being.

24:40
dehydrated and almost passing out in the field. So it's always good to be aware and know your
limits, know what you're going to be doing. I feel like in a lot of ways, preparing to go collecting,
even just for an afternoon, is a lot like preparing to go on a hike. You need to know what the
weather is gonna be like, what kind of things you need to pack in your backpack. Generally just
being prepared and being thoughtful.

25:07
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Yeah, definitely. I have a backpack that I take with me regardless of where I'm going collecting
that has my water bladder in it. It has some rather light but still good to have first aid stuff in there
navigation. So an atlas or some sort of map of where I'm going and then all of my collecting
materials. But where I go collecting, I might add things in or take things out.

25:37
this is the bare minimum I need to have with me. I will include extra things if I'm going to be gone
for a longer period of time or going into a particularly rough terrain where I might encounter
something else that I wouldn't usually. So you mentioned vials. There are lots of different
containers to hold specimens. And then also you need to get the specimens to the place that
they're going to live.

26:05
either in a lab or in your home or in a museum collection. What are your sort of recommendations
about transporting the specimens, especially if you're not going straight to the lab, for example?
Yeah, there's a couple of different ways that you can do this. My preferred method, I have these
plastic Nalgene bottles that I get from the container store or REI. They're meant to hold liquids
and stuff while you're camping.

26:34
They are resistant to the chemical ethyl acetate that I use to actually euthanize the insects. And
because they're plastic, I'm not worried about them breaking in the field. My first ever insect
collecting jar that I used was glass, and I broke it within like a week of having it. So I've switched
almost entirely to plastic. Another option you can use is just a falcon tube or some other screw
top.

27:03
full of ethanol or alcohol of some sort. And my go-to for live specimens, if it's something I would
like to photograph or maybe bring home to do some observation on it that way, is just a normal
plastic snap cap vial. And for those I prefer the snap caps versus the screw-ons because if I have
the bug in one hand I need to be able to open the lid with the other and with the screw top it's a
little bit more challenging.

27:31
Like I said before, any sort of container. I know I've used like a hard sunglasses case to collect
stuff before. A chip bag in the woods and just put something in there, rolled the top down, dumped
out my water when I knew I was a safe distance from getting back to hold a big specimen, things
like that. I feel like this is a hazard in associating with entomologists is that like any given
container of any kind might contain a specimen.

28:01
Yeah. We touched on this briefly, but collecting can be a group activity. You can certainly go
collect by yourself. Some people love that. For me, I do kind of like to collect with other people. It's
a lot of fun. I learn a lot, especially if the person I'm collecting with or the people I'm collecting with
have some interest aside from mine. Collecting with people is great. You and I have been out in
the field together. And while I certainly do a fair share of collecting,

28:31
on my own, it's always fun to have somebody there, whether it's another entomologist or just a
friend of mine that would be curious about the process. The stuff that I get excited about might not
be exciting to whoever is there with me, but seeing them excited about something else is very
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 be exciting to whoever is there with me, but seeing them excited about something else is very
rewarding. My mom was out here visiting me for the first time last week and we tried to go
collecting. It was...

29:01
It was a whole situation, it was very windy, and really the only thing of note that flew in was Haile's
Lineata, the White Line Sphinx Moth, which to me is something that I see incredibly regularly, but
my mom, as not an entomologist at all, was very very excited about that. So I was excited that she
was excited about a bug that I generally would not think that much about.

29:30
It's also good to go out with entomologists that work on your group, but also it's nice to go out with
ones who don't. If you go out together, there's more of a chance of collecting that very specific
thing because maybe they know a trick about finding it that you don't. But I love going out
collecting with Lepidopterists because I'm not going to be after any of the moths that they care
about.

30:00
and they're getting the moths off the sheet so I can more easily see my very tiny beetles. So it
works out very well for both of us. And yeah, it is always fun to be out in the field, I think, with
other people. And also non-entomologists, like collecting across taxa, I think can be really fun,
especially when your taxa are collected a different part of the day. So you kind of get different
types of collecting throughout your day or throughout your trip.

30:29
And just in general, I think that taxonomists and zoologists and science enthusiasts of all sorts, we
all share an excitement for nature that just makes it really fun to spend time together, especially
exploring a new natural area. Yeah, definitely. So here at ASU, we have all of our natural history
collections in one building. And so with that, we all work very closely together. If I have a question
about something that I've

30:57
you know, a plant that I found a beetle on, I can just walk down the hall and talk to our botanist.
But what this also results in is us doing lab trips quite a bit, where we'll get to a new site and we'll
follow our botanist around learning about plants for a little bit. Then as it's getting dark, we'll go out
and set Sherman traps to collect small mammals. We will then stay up late collecting the insects
at the black light sheet.

31:27
In the morning, we will get up, go collect those live mammals in the Sherman traps, get all the
data from them, then maybe go out birding. At any point during that time, if anyone finds a lizard
or a snake or a frog, you yell about it so everyone can come see it. And even though I am not a
mammologist by trade, the knowledge that those people have about their groups is fascinating to
me. So even though

31:55
I don't get to see small mammals every day, and I don't know that much about them. It's a great
opportunity to be able to go and learn about them from someone who does have expertise.
Absolutely. Like you mentioned, you and I have been collecting together, and you have a ton of
expertise in lots of different topics. And it's super fun to learn about beetles from you, and also
birds and mammals.
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 birds and mammals.

32:24
Last time we were out, we saw... Was it a skunk? Yeah, yeah, the Western spotted skunk. That
was really neat. So one of the things that's kind of a new standard with collections is having that
data available to share with other people who are interested. Back in the day, if I had a really
interesting beetle in my collection, that's...

32:52
incredibly beneficial to me, but no one else would really know that I have that. So making
collections digital in some way is kind of the new standard that people are moving towards, where
a lot of collections are verbatim digitizing that little label that is underneath the insect specimen
and putting that up online. So that way if you search a data aggregator like Gbif,

33:21
any collection that has that particular species that you're looking for that they've digitized, that
record will come up, and that can help facilitate getting loans from those institutions to work on
something. And my personal collection is in that state. I have, like I said, about 2000 of my
specimens fully digitized and online and available. But if you're someone just getting into it, and
you would like some sort of documentation for

33:50
what you've seen in the field or what you've gotten in your collection. Things like iNaturalist are a
great way to record that because you can take a picture of something you've seen in the field,
upload it, and that usually tags on that sort of label data, quote unquote, like the where, the when,
and the how you saw that certain thing. And then you have a community of people that will come
on and help you identify something. So if you're just getting started and you know, you're having a
hard time

34:20
a beetle from a fly, over time you can learn from this community. And that's a lot of what
entomology and a lot of what collections are is, is knowing that community and knowing who to
reach out to if you have something weird in a specific group, you kind of develop a database in
your head of who works on that group, so you can contact them for, for help with some.

34:48
I'll just add on to that that there are also Facebook groups and things like that that focus on insect
collecting techniques and locations and, you know, people that have personal collections. So if
that's something you're interested in, there are definitely groups and forums and things like that
where you can connect with other people, maybe in your area or across the country that have
ideas on new trap designs or whatever's worked for them. That can be shared.

35:17
online as well as in person at some of those other meetups that we were talking about. If you're a
person who already has a collection going, there's also a portal called Ecdysis. And I know that
that's a portal you use, right? Yeah. So Ecdysis is built on the Symbiota platform, which is the
same database functionality that Scan had. And Ecdysis is specifically for Arthropod portals.

35:48
And historically, databases like Scan and among others were catered to university collections. But
as we're moving in this digital age of wanting specimen data available online, there's really no
difference in a specimen that I have in my collection or you have in yours, versus a museum
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 difference in a specimen that I have in my collection or you have in yours, versus a museum
specimen. If all the data is there,

36:17
specimen's a specimen. So the really cool thing about ectasis is that it supports individual
research projects or individual research collections. And since that started a couple years ago, I
think it really kicked off in 2020, there are a ton of graduate students that have started digitizing
their specimens either for their dissertation or just for projects that

36:46
all the specimens that they have. And it's a tremendously valuable resource to make that data
publicly available, to have it be potentially used for any type of research. Yeah, and the other nice
thing about iCdice is that it does work to Gbif, the big global data aggregator. So now if someone
were to search for

37:12
a specific ground beetle that I happen to have in my collection, my data will pop up there right
alongside the Smithsonian's database if they happen to have that same specimen. And while it
hasn't happened yet, if someone were to contact me and ask for a loan of those specimens, I
would be more than happy to do that, because I want this stuff to be useful.

37:41
beyond just like my personal reference and like beyond just sitting on my desk. Yeah, I'm a big
fan. I want to briefly add here, there are also in-person groups of people who do this. Most states
have an entomological society, and that is inclusive of anybody who's interested in entomology. In
fact, I think in my local chapter, most of the members are not actively employed in like an
entomological field.

38:10
Some of them are retired, some of them are non-scientists, and everyone is just brought together
by an enjoyment of insects and arthropods. And I've been on collecting trips through that kind of
group. I've learned a ton. Oftentimes these groups host lecture series and things like that. I think
it's a really great way to get involved. Yeah, definitely. It's like with the birding community having
all their different chapters of the Audubon Society, where they'll go out and do

38:39
bird walks or have lecture series. There are entomology groups or even just like kind of loose
communities that are less official that will have meetups and things like that. I know back in the
day Bug Guide used to host meetups where people could just come and hang out and do insect
stuff. Here in Arizona we have a party during the monsoon season called Infestation down at
Ramsey Canyon where it's just a bunch of entomologists from

39:08
all over the state and over the years people from all over the country have come to meet up and
basically have a night of hanging out and talking about insects together. And those sorts of local
groups can bridge that gap between academic entomologists or folks who are retired or have just
been doing this a really long time, all the way down to maybe some of the people showing up
bring their kids that have an interest. So that really does kind of branch that whole spectrum.

39:39
listening to this conversation, people can assume that collecting is a lot of fun, it's very interesting,
it provides a lot of really important scientific information. Why do you personally collect? And also,
:
 it provides a lot of really important scientific information. Why do you personally collect? And also,
why do you keep a collection? What value does that bring? I think what I'm trying to say is, why
does collecting matter? One of my favorite questions to answer. As you touched on earlier in the
episode,

40:08
I get this question a lot. As an entomologist, I love insects more than most things. And certainly I
like insects more than the average person likes insects. And their question is always like, well,
you love insects so much, but you've killed thousands of them. And and now you just have them
and like, why? And to me, it started off as building a reference for myself, but

40:35
As I've gotten to work with collections more over the years, I realize how important specimen
information is to the greater scientific community. Those same people, oftentimes, you know, if
they see an insect in their house, it's going to leave squished on the bottom of their shoe. But for
me, you know, it will come back, it will be labeled, pinned, prepped, identified, data-based.

41:05
And then when I'm gone, that specimen will still be here. There are specimens here at the ASU
collection from the mid 1800s. The oldest known insect specimen in the world, I believe, is from
like 1709. You can fact check me on that one, but it's older than the United States is as a country.
And so with proper care,

41:30
these collections and the knowledge held within these specimens will far outlive me. And I'm
contributing to the scientific information that people are going to be looking at in 50 to 100 years
from now, the same way that we look back at the specimens from 50 and 100 years ago. So that's
another thing that people bring up a lot of the time is, well, we have collections that have

42:00
millions of specimens and then like why do we have to keep collecting them and keep making
these things. And it's because the way that we use the data now, looking back at historical
records, we are going to be those historical records at some point. So figuring out where things
are found, population densities, where and when they can be collected and recorded, all of that
can change over time. And so

42:30
having these specimens as that snapshot of biodiversity at a certain place at a certain time is the
reason that I collect now is to help future scientists kind of have access to the same information
that I have looking back at older specimens.

43:00
they would say like 19 to mean 1919 or, you know, 04 to mean 1904. You can sort of use context
clues or go back into some of the other data you might have in a collection to verify if that is, you
know, 1804, 1904, 2004. But over time, I kind of love seeing those labels. It doesn't bother me
anymore because I think it's kind of

43:29
I guess it just is kind of incredible to me that our time, like a scientist bent over that specimen a
hundred years in the future, was just like totally beyond their imagination to the point that they
didn't even put the first two digits of the year on that label. And so now we are here and we are
able to do work for the benefit of a world that is beyond our imagining as well.
:
 able to do work for the benefit of a world that is beyond our imagining as well.

43:58
the ability to look at DNA or anything like that. And so preserving specimens and having them
around for the future technologies that we can't even fathom yet is another really important case
and another really important reason to maintain collections and continue to grow collections.
Absolutely. Evan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

44:28
I've really enjoyed talking with you and I hope people really benefit from the information that
you've shared. Yeah, thanks for having me Zoe, this was fun. I'm always looking for an excuse to
talk about insects and collecting them. Me too. Thanks for listening to this episode of the New
Species Podcast. This podcast was created by Brian Patrick and is edited and produced by Zoe
Albion. If you would like to support us, please consider subscribing to our Patreon.

44:57
at patreon.com slash newspeciespod. And if you'd like to get in touch with questions or feedback,
please email us at newspeciespodcast at gmail.com.

[bright, tech-y music returns]

Zoe: Thanks for listening to this episode of the New Species Podcast. This podcast is created by
Brian Patrick, and is edited and produced by Zoe Albion. If you would like to support us, please
consider subscribing to our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/NewSpeciesPod. And if you’d like
to get in touch with questions or feedback, please e-mail us at [email protected].

[music fades out]

45:12
I'm not really a an intestinal parasite girl that I'm sure vets see all sorts of like gnarly intestinal
parasites. Oh, yeah. Parasites in general are make me a little squirmy, but I can appreciate how
cool they are. That's how I feel too. Probably again, not something you'll want to keep in but also
at that fish and wildlife thing, they had a whole like a whole freezer full of deer heads. And they
were looking at them for chronic wasting disease, but we were hoping to get

45:41
deer nosebots out of them, with the fly like shoots the larva up the nose and then they live back in
the condyles. And so we were like cutting the deer down the cheeks like the Joker and then
popping the bottom jaws off and then these like inch and a half long grubs were just popping out
and it was awful but also really cool. That's kind of awesome. Why wouldn't I want to keep that in?
I- up to you.
: