Learning from the past
The Museum of Zoology holds between 15,000 and 20,000 UK butterflies in its collections. This new exhibition reveals some of the fascinating stories held in these storerooms, with many specimens from the Museum’s catalogue being made available to the public for the first time.
The exhibition is made possible by the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, which seeks to share significant collections with as many people as possible. Accordingly, visitors to the Museum of Zoology can now experience first-hand the colourful displays of Apatura iris (Purple Emperors), trusty Vanessa atalanta (Red Admirals), and many other UK-native species.
Apatura iris (Purple Emperor), courtesy of the University of Cambridge.
Apatura iris (Purple Emperor), courtesy of the University of Cambridge.
Some of these butterflies have been held in storage for over 150 years. Even after this long tenure, the specimens look vibrant and fresh – they could’ve been caught last week. Preserving such precious specimens requires constant vigilance.
‘We set them in a dark storeroom and keep them in airtight drawers,’ says Dr Edgar Turner, Curator of Insects at the Museum. ‘We’re always protecting our dead insects from living ones. The key pests are ‘museum beetles’, and they’re infamous for eating specimens. If we spot live beetles in a drawer, we have to freeze the whole thing to get rid of them.’
Meet the team: Evie Crouch, Research Assistant, Dr Gwen Hitchcock from the Wildlife Trust, Dr Edgar Turner, Curator of Insects at the Museum, and Matthew Hayes, Research Assistant.
Meet the team: Evie Crouch, Research Assistant, Dr Gwen Hitchcock from the Wildlife Trust, Dr Edgar Turner, Curator of Insects at the Museum, and Matthew Hayes, Research Assistant.
Historic specimens allow modern scientists to assess population change over time. By comparing what collectors brought in hundreds of years ago, they can form a picture of what’s missing from our current ecological landscape.
Researchers across Cambridge are putting this technique into action. A team from the Department of Geography has used data recorded by naturalists and gardeners since the mid-18th century to establish that UK plants are flowering a full month earlier due to climate change.
The story of Cambridgeshire’s butterfly populations over the last 200 years is a similarly complicated one, with some species declining severely and others increasing their numbers.
That’s why notebooks such as those penned by Leonard Jenyns, a Cambridgeshire naturalist and contemporary of Charles Darwin, are so valuable. The exhibition uses passages from Jenyns’s notebooks, which were donated to the Museum in 1865, to highlight historical transformations in butterfly populations.
For example, the first pages of one of Jenyns’s notebooks describe an abundance of Swallowtails (Papilio machaon), ‘found in the greatest plenty, throughout the Fens between Ely and Cambridge.’ The fact that they are now absent from Cambridgeshire shows how much has changed in that passage of time. Visitors can see Swallowtail specimens on the top floor of the museum, where their bumblebee-yellow patterns still radiate from their cases.
‘Historical journals and accounts of species populations are the clearest way we can measure how things have changed,’ says Matthew Hayes.
Dr Edgar Turner agrees: ‘It’s the closest scientists can get to time travel. Notebooks like those of Leonard Jenyns show us what conservation can aim for. The kind of world we could bring back.’
This resuscitation may sound impossible, but it’s precisely what the team are aiming to achieve in their work on habitat restoration.
