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INVERTEBRATE ZOOLOGY

More in Invertebrate Zoology
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Welcome to the Division of Invertebrate Zoology. Our staff study and archive the
living non-vertebrate animals, which make up 95% of all animal species.

Search our specimen database.

The Division research collections contain more than 24 million specimens,
representing ~500,000 species. Most of these specimens are terrestrial
arthropods, but there are large collections of marine and freshwater
invertebrates.

Strengths of the collections reflect the research of current and past curators:
Arachnids (especially spiders and scorpions), aculeate (sting-bearing)
Hymenoptera (including bees, wasps and ants), gall wasps (Cynipoidea),
certain Diptera (especially Drosophilidae, Syrphidae and Tachinidae),
Hemiptera, Isoptera (termites) and their symbiotic protists, macro-Lepidoptera
(particularly of the New World), rove beetles (Staphylinidae), the primitively
wingless insects (bristletails and silverfish), marine Mollusca, and fossils in
amber. Research centers around field exploration, the collections, and
laboratory studies using morphology and DNA sequences to examine the
evolutionary relationships of a spectrum of groups from species to phyla.

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Returning a loan? Send to:

Division of Invertebrate Zoology
American Museum of Natural History
200 Central Park West
New York, NY 10024-5192 USA


A NEW WING FOR BUTTERFLIES

A view of the western room which contains the swallowtails (Papilionidae) and
larger Nymphalidae.
© AMNH

The museum's research collection of 1.3 million butterflies has migrated to a
modern new facility in the spectacular Richard Gilder Center for Science and
Innovation.  The museum has also received a butterfly collection of exceptional
significance from the butterfly biologists Philip J. DeVries and Carla Penz.


13,000 CRABS CRAWL INTO AMNH

Fiddler crab Leptuca saltitanta
Jovanni Gonzalez

The American Museum of Natural History recently received the life’s work of a
professor in Minnesota—1,274 jars of crabs collected over decades from around
the world.


EXTINCT AND ENDANGERED: INSECTS IN PERIL

Show Transcript

EXTINCT & ENDANGERED

[Levon Biss examines a delicate butterfly specimen under a desk lamp.]

LEVON BISS (Photographer): As a photographer, you know, the most fun you can
have is when you’ve got a subject that allows you to play creatively with light.

[Biss adjusts pieces on an elaborately-rigged camera and light set-up inside a
studio.]

BISS: When I photographed humans, for example, I used to use light all the time
because it allows me to sculpt around the subject, to emphasize certain
features.

[Biss arranges the butterfly specimen on the photo rig, very close to the camera
lens.]

BISS: The challenge here is doing that on the subject is five millimeters long,
but the principles are still the same.

[Macrophotograph of a brilliant orange and yellow butterfly—the same specimen
Biss was arranging in front of the camera.]

[Text: Extinct & Endangered | Imperiled insects from the collection of the
American Museum of Natural History] 

[The screen is split into a triptych with three different clips of Biss holding
a large, black insect (a Lord Howe Island stick insect), pinned in a specimen
box. The center strip maintains a clip of Biss and the stick insect, but the
flanking scenes show him examining other insect specimens.]

BISS: I came into this project, Extinct and Endangered with the view that I
think we should talk about more serious and pressing subjects of insect decline
and biodiversity.

[Biss speaks in his studio.]

[Text: Levon Biss | Photographer]

BISS: I don’t think people really understand the importance of insects and what
they do for us—us, as a species, but the planet as a whole.

[Biss edits macro images of insects on a desktop computer.

BISS: We need to understand that they’re important and we can’t just ignore them
because they’re hard to see. 

[An insect (a firebrat) with scale- and hair-like structures waggles its
antenna.]

JESSICA WARE (Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology): We think that insects
evolved sometime around 450 million years ago.

[A damselfly alights on a grass stalk.]

WARE: But we know that winged insects, they probably evolved around 400 million
years ago. It was before the rise of flowering plants.

[A mantis sits on the branches of a conifer. A field with thousands of tiny,
flying insects, flitting over grasses.]

WARE: There was no birds, there was no bat, there were no pterosaurs, there was
nothing in the sky until insects.

[Ware speaks in her office.]

[Text: Jessica Ware | Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology]

WARE: It’s hard to imagine the world before insects because so much of what is
characteristic about the Earth that we live in has been shaped by, you know,
hundreds of millions of years of insect evolution.

[Screen is split between a scene of coffee pouring into a mug and pollinating
insects bustling around coffee plant flowers. An ant carries a crumb over a
picnic blanket.]

WARE: From the morning we got up to the point when I’m speaking to you now,
actually insects have been a part of that.

[A triptych of a silk moth, dozens of silk cocoons trundling down a factory
belt, and a sewing machine at work]

WARE: Whether it was in the clothing that we wear,

[Dozens of apples move down a conveyor belt. A dung beetle rolls a ball of dung
along the ground.]

WARE: …the food that we’re eating, there’s a lot of things that we kind of take
for granted that insects are doing.

[A fly buzzes around the inside of a flower. A butterfly lands sips nectar from
a garden blossom.]

DAVID GRIMALDI (Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology): Most people don’t
know about the incredibly important ecological roles that so many insects play. 

[Grimaldi speaks in his office.]

[Text: David Grimaldi | Curator, Division of Invertebrate Zoology]

GRIMALDI: They’re the main pollinators of plants. About 85 percent of the
world’s flowering plants are pollinated by insects.

[Termites chew on a dead leaf.]

WARE: You know, they decompose things.

[A woodpecker delivers a mouthful of insect larvae to its young.]

WARE: They’re a great source of food for a lot of animals. They really structure
our ecosystem. 

[A beetle crawls across a fern and spreads its wings.]

WARE: Understanding the history of Earth is understanding the history of
insects. 

[Rodger Gwiazdowski speaks from his lab.]

[Text: Rodger Gwiazdoski | Entomologist]

RODGER GWIAZDOWSKI, Entomologist: I think a core responsibility as a scientist,
regardless of what field you’re in, is that you make the unseen seen.

[A small tiger beetle darts across a hand displaying it to the camera.]

GWIAZDOWSKI: And I think insects get overlooked a lot and get unseen a lot.

[A macro view of the same tiger beetle species. A full view of a beetle is
flanked by extreme close-ups of its front legs, sporting dozens of spiky
hair-like structures.]

GWIAZDOWSKI: But when you can see them literally larger than life, it’s a way to
realize their importance in the world.

[Biss zooms in to an image of the stick insect on his desktop computer.]

BISS: Working at this kind of magnification brings a whole new set of
challenges. With every different insect that you photograph, there’s so many
different elements to it that are unique to that specific insect.

[Montage of macro images showing diverse, hair-like structures on the bodies of
beetles, butterflies, and bees.]

BISS: Hairs, for example, come in so many different varieties. 

[Biss speaks in his studio.]

BISSS: Before I started shooting macro and insects, I had no idea about, you
know, the fact that the hairs on the back of a tiger beetles seem to be hollow.

[Triptych of macro images of different tiger beetle hairs.]  

BISS: Certainly, when you put light on them, they kind of glow. 

[Hands open a specimen drawer in the Museum’s entomology research collections.]

GWIAZDOWSKI: Tiger beetles in North America are small. They’re about an inch to
about a half inch long.

[Close-up of two tiger beetle specimens pinned with labels. Their eyes take up a
large portion of their heads.]

GWIAZDOWSKI: They all have large, very large eyes, bug eyes, on their head with
these very large jaws.

[A living tiger beetle pauses for a moment on the sand and then runs off.]

GWIAZDOSKI: They’re vicious predators. And they all have very, very long legs
because they’re fast runners.

[Waves, formed in the wake of a motor boat, lap up on to a sandy river beach.]

GWIAZDOSKI: Tiger beetles have inherently evolved to live in very dynamic
environments, whether it’s deserts or beaches.

[Drone footage of city office buildings and a busy highway along the Connecticut
River in Massachusetts.]

GWIAZDOSKI: The problem is that we as humans have made some of those habitats
unlivable-ly dynamic, even for tiger beetles.

[Grimaldi speaks in his office.]

GRIMALDI: The first indication that we had that drew a lot of alarm to the
plummeting of insect populations and species diversity was a 2017 study

[A copy of the research paper lies on the forest floor. An ant crawls over a
graph plotting the amount of biomass versus the progression of years from 1990
to 2015. It shows a downward trend.]

GRIMALDI: …which recorded dramatic declines in specimen numbers and species
numbers. And that was in Germany.

[Grimaldi speaks in his office.]

GRIMALDI: Since then, people have rounded up data and we’re doing a lot more
studies, but the indications are that it’s happening globally. And it’s
something that people have noticed anecdotally for a long time.

[A single moth flutters around a porch light at night.]

GRIMALDI: Where are all the moths at the porch lights?

[Archival footage of a car driving down a motorway in 1970s UK.]

BISS: When I was a kiddie, I remember you go out in a car on the motorway, a
freeway, your windshield and the front of the car will be spattered with
insects.

[THE SPLATS OF INSECTS HITTING A WINDSHIELD.]

BISS: You know, it just doesn’t happen anymore.

[Biss speaks in his studio.]

BISS: And that is just a simple way we can understand that the actual mass, the
volume of insects surrounding us has declined.

[A fly with a long proboscis and iridescent wings delicately sips at a flower.]

BISS: It is also the diversity, though. You know, you can have vast quantities
of insects, but you need diversity.

[Several different types of bees and wasps forage among small flowers.]

BISS: You need to have multiple species working in harmony to produce a balanced
ecosystem. And that’s what we’re losing.

[Ware speaks in her office.]

WARE: Like, without hyperbole, we’re in a very serious conundrum. Insects have
undergone mass extinctions in the past,

[A single firefly flashes from a blade of grass.]

WARE: …but right now the mass extinction that we’re seeing seems to be the
largest that’s ever been recorded.

[A few flashes of fireflies blink in a twilit field. A single firefly cleans its
antenna.]

GRIMALDI: Once the populations really start to decline, you become in danger of
losing that species.

[Grimaldi speaks in his office.]

GRIMALDI: Right now, we’re just in the process of trying to quantify how much
insects are in trouble.

[Close-up of a hand clicking a number on a counter.]

GWIAZDOWSKI: Neil, Abby’s got two.

NEIL: Got it.

[A line of people walk slowly along a river beach, counting beetle sightings and
calling them out.]

GWIAZDOWSKI: A core conservation tool for almost all endangered species is
population monitoring. And this is the simple but structured process of going to
their habitat at certain parts of their life cycle and understanding how many of
those individuals there are.

[Gwiazdowski speaks in his lab.]

GWIAZDOWSKI: So, we’ll do these counts for the adult tiger beetles several times
over the year in their habitat.

[In a time lapse sequence, five people fan out across a river beach and move
towards the camera, counting tiger beetles as they go.]

GWIAZDOWSKI: It’s really straightforward.  We will take a line of people. We
will walk in that line through the habitat. All of us will be talking to each
other about how many beetles we see. By the time we’ve gone all the way through
to the end of the habitat, we take a total, and that’s our count.

[Gwiazdowski speaks in his lab.]

GWIAZDOWSKI: And comparing this information year to year allows us to estimate
population trends, whether it’s increases or declines, from which we make
conservation decisions.

[A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officer, one of the tiger beetle surveyors,
drives a motorboat down the Connecticut River. He, along with other volunteers,
unload the boat on the river beach.]

GRIMALDI: We have to rely on entomologists and other biologists to go out into
the field and monitor insects.

[Leafy trees stretch across the reflection of a blue sky in the waters of a
peaceful river.]

GRIMALDI: But we shouldn’t wait for the counts, you know. We should start
protecting natural areas.

[Close-up of a tiger beetle hesitating on the sand before it races out of
frame.]

GRIMALDI: You can’t really appreciate something unless you know something about
it.

[Grimaldi speaks in his office.]

GRIMALDI: The thing I want most for people to appreciate about insects is their
exquisite, intricate beauty.

[A montage of Biss’s macrophotography—a beetle, a ladybug, a cicada, a bee, a
grasshopper—dissolves into a shot of the actual grasshopper specimen.]

BISS: Now, when you can stand in front of that insect, and marvel in its beauty,

[Biss speaks in his studio.]

BISS: …but then you understand also that it’s extinct, it’s gone, it’s never
coming back, and the reason for that is us—

[Biss displays a beetle specimen with a striking pattern on its wings. He moves
a magnifying lens over the body of a stick insect.]

BISS: …hopefully, people will walk away with an appreciation of them. And
they’ll marvel in them, and they’ll realize that they’re too beautiful to be
lost. They’re too important to be lost.

[The camera pulls back from a velvety butterfly specimen with beautiful
teardrop-shaped lower wings.]

[Credits roll.]

Insects help keep natural ecosystems healthy, from pollinating plants to
decomposing and recycling life's remains. Unfortunately, the evidence is very
clear that many insect species are in significant decline.

Through the uniquely powerful macrophotography of Levon Biss, you can experience
up close the impact of these tiny creatures in the Akeley Corridor and the East
Galleria at AMNH. Large-format photographs of 40 specimens from the Division of
Invertebrate Zoology's world-class research collection show the intricate
uniqueness of these endangered or extinct species. Take this opportunity to see
the magic insects have to offer.


RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS

Digitizing our Marine Invertebrate Collection!

Digitizing our Terrestrial Polyneoptera Collection!

Palaeoclimate ocean conditions shaped the evolution of corals and their
skeletons through deep time.

 * New species of beetle named after Patricia Vaurie, who worked on beetles at
   the Museum as a Research Associate
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