I blogged a few months ago about how the Bioblitz project was going after we had completed the first three reviews. I discussed the bird, mammal and reptile Bioblitzes. Now some time has passed, I can fill you in on the rest of the review events. Check out the project page and Horniman blog to get an understanding/refresher of what we’re trying to achieve.
We’re still tweeting from @HornimanReviews and using Flickr to showcase my images so be sure to head over there and give us some love. As mentioned in a previous post, Jo and I presented the Project at the last NatSCA conference in York. It went well and we received some great feedback (and were even approached by Kathie Way offering to look at our molluscs). Here’s a recently updated presentation to give you a bit more background to the project.
It’s been a busy spring and summer so far with an additional five review events behind us. We’re nearly finished with the reviews and will be focusing on community engagement and disseminating the results. For now, I want to introduce you to some more of the experts we’ve worked with as well as some of the cool specimens we’ve found.
Entomology
Starting from where I left off, the next review was entomology. Many hundreds of drawers of arthropod specimens is a very different prospect to the vertebrate material we looked at. Howard Mendel joined us for three days to take a look at our almost 100,000 specimens. In advance of his arrival, we first had to empty the entom store room. It’s a very small space with a couple of dozen insect cabinets rubik’s cubed in there. To ensure every drawer would be accessible, almost every cabinet was taken out, its drawers wiped and cleaned (the glass) and then positioned in one of the halls in the Horniman’s collection store, ready for Howard’s critical eyes.
Molluscs
The mollusc Bioblitz is the only review event I was not present for. Although it felt odd to not be there to capture the magic, it went well and Jon Ablett and Kathie Way from the NHM were great. I saw Kathie as she went through some of the mollusc material at the museum itself and include those photos here. Visit the Horniman’s blog to hear more about what they found.

A lot of the mollusc material has data. We now need to do some further research to find out how good or usable the data is.

“These snails are predatory and venomous. They are capable of “stinging” humans, therefore live ones should be handled carefully or not at all.” Ha.
Marine Invertebrates
This group includes crustaceans, corals, sponges and echinoderms (and doesn’t include molluscs since they were looked at separately). Roger Bamber was our expert reviewer for this material and spent three days looking through a whole variety of specimens. Sadly, this group, although incredibly dynamic and glorious when living, lose a lot of their charm once dead and dried. Just to give you an idea of how wonderful marine invertebrates are, check out this Flickr profile for some truly amazing shots. A lot of the marine invert specimens are in the fluid collection store which made for an interesting day. Four of us crammed in the small, claustrophobic space with lovely fumes and loud extractor fans. For more detail about what we found, see here.
The other two reviews were the geology ones (minerals and fossils). I’ll write a post about these (and the last remaining future Bioblitzes) soon. For now, I hope these three reviews were of interest and give you an idea of how we’re approaching this process.
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