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Published: November 9, 2011

The value of specimens of all ages

John Bates, Curator and Section Head, Life Sciences, Negaunee Integrative Research Center

When I talked to my colleagues about using this photo of dead baby birds in a blog, several felt it might bother people, so I have been debating about whether or not I should put it up.  But as I saw several forensic crime shows on TV, I decided that, as a society, we seem to be getting more accustomed to scenes like this when there might be a question that can be answered.  So, my goal is not to offend anyone with this, but I think the photo does make an important visual contribution to what I wanted to write about the value of collections during the breeding season.

When I talked to my colleagues about using this photo of dead baby birds in a blog, several felt it might bother people, so I have been debating about whether or not I should put it up.  But as I saw several forensic crime shows on TV, I decided that, as a society, we seem to be getting more accustomed to scenes like this when there might be a question that can be answered.  So, my goal is not to offend anyone with this, but I think the photo does make an important visual contribution to what I wanted to write about the value of collections during the breeding season.  I took the accompanying photos last week as Adjunct Curator Dave Willard, Collections Assistant Mary Hennen, and Bird Division volunteer (and long-time Museum collections-database guru) Peter Lowther were preparing fluid specimens of a large number of baby birds of various common species that have come to us through the various salvage programs that Dave has overseen over the last several years. This means that all these specimens died despite efforts to save them and they eventually were given to us.  Dave et al. were taking tissue from each specimen for cryogenic storage, and then the specimens were injected with formalin.  They will be put into our fluid collection with other bird specimens preserved similarly.  The data will be available on-line and the specimens will be preserved in perpetuity for researchers.

What got my attention with respect to wanting to take this photo was that all the baby birds in this picture are American Robins (Turdus migratorius).  So, to me what the photo illustrates effectively is the amazing development one species goes through from hatching to fledging.  For American Robins, hatching to fledging takes just 14-16 days!  So these salvaged specimens document the stages that hatchlings of Turdus migratoriusgo through to become juveniles capable of flight and their first migration.  At the same time, something else struck me.  There are 65 species in the genus Turdus, and I would hazard a guess that there may be no specimens of non-fledged young for more than half of these species in any museum collection in the world.  I further would guess that this is true for well over half of the more than 10,000 species of birds in the world.

There is a long history of excellent research following nests of birds by ornithologists who measure the young and band them.  Collections of developmental series provide extremely valuable complimentary data to this research.  For example, the fluid specimens allow one to study how muscles, bones and organs develop, so they provide data that are not easily obtained in any other way.  These specimens may harbor clues about the myriad of complications that face all species as they try to raise young, from birth defects to environmental hazards.  Having the specimen (along with tissue) means that far into the future comparisons can be made to subsequent populations (and other species) that would not be possible otherwise. 

Any of us with children and access to the web know how much scientific information there is about human children, after all this is the period when so much that will effect the future of those individuals is happening.  There is an entire field of Pediatrics with many subfields devoted to the study of non-adult humans.  So it seems strange that for most other species with which we share the planet, even relatively easy to study and understand animals, like birds, we often have little or limited information on how young develop. 

While I can understand that some might look on this photo and see nothing more than a grisly documentation that not all young birds reach adulthood or even get far beyond the hatching stage, what I see is the potential to investigate a host of questions now and into the future about American Robins.  As stewards of the planet, humans owe it to the rest of biodiversity to have better data and knowledge about comparative development of young because I suspect, just a with humans, it could teach us an awful lot about how all these species are or are not coping with a world they are forced to share with 7 billion people.

If you want to read another blog post about some different kinds of specimen preparations in our collection, check out what our volunteer Meera Sethi posted recently: http://www.scienceessayist.com.  (Thanks Meera!)

John Bates
Curator and Section Head, Life Sciences

Contact Information

The tropics harbor the highest species diversity on the planet.  I am most intrigued by evolution at the tips of the tree of life.  My students and I study genetic structure in tropical birds and other organisms to address how this diversity evolved and how it continues to evolve as climates change and humans continue to alter landscapes.

We study comparative genetic structure and evolution primarily in the Afrotropics, the Neotropics, and the Asian tropics.  I am an ornithologist, but students working with me and my wife Shannon Hackett and other museum curators also have studied amphibians and small mammals (bats and rodents) and more recently internal, external and blood parasites (e.g., Lutz et al. 2015, Block et al. 2015, Patitucci et al. 2016).  Research in the our lab has involved gathering and interpreting genetic data in both phylogeographic and phylogenetic frameworks. Phylogenetic work on Neotropical birds has focused on rates of diversification and comparative biogeography (Tello and Bates 2007, Pantané et al 2009, Patel et al. 2011, Lutz et al. 2013, Dantas et al. 2015).  Phylogeographic work has sought to understand comparative patterns of divergence at level of population and species across different biomes (Bates et al 2003, Bates et al. 2004, Bowie et al. 2006, I. Caballero dissertation research, Block et al. 2015, Winger and Bates 2015, Lawson et al. 2015).  We also have used genetic data to better understand evolutionary patterns in relation to climate change across landscapes (e.g., Carnaval and Bates 2007) that include the Albertine Rift (through our MacArthur Grants, e.g., Voelker et al. 2010, Engel et al. 2014), the Eastern Arc Mountains (Lawson dissertation research, Lawson et al. 2015), the Philippines (T. Roberts and S. Weyandt dissertation research) and South America, particularly the Amazon (Savit dissertation research, Savit and Bates 2015, Figueiredo et al. 2013), and we are entering into the genomic realm focusing initially on Andean (Winger et al. 2015) and Amazonian birds (through our NSF Dimensions of Diversity grant). Shane DuBay is doing his dissertation research in the Himalayas on physiological plasticity in Tarsiger Bush Robins.  Nick Crouch, who I co-advise at U. Illinois, Chicago with Roberta Mason-Gamer, is studying specialization in birds from a modern phylogenetic perspective.  We seek to create a broader understanding of diversification in the tropics from a comparative biogeographic framework (Silva and Bates 2002, Kahindo et al, 2007, Bates et al. 2008, Antonelli et al. 2009).  João Capurucho (U. Illinois, Chicago, co-advised with Mary Ashley)  is studying phlylogeography of Amazonian white sand specialist birds and Natalia Piland (Committee on Evolutionary Biology, U. Chicago) is studying the impact of urbanization on Neotropical birds.  New graduate student Valentina Gomez Bahamon (U. Illinois, Chicago) is also working Boris Igic and me, after doing her Master Degree in her native Colombia on genomics and the evolution of migrating Fork-tailed Flycatchers (Tyrannus savana).  Jacob Cooper (Committee on Evolutionary Biology, U. Chicago) is studying the diversification of birds in Afromonte forests

Josh Engel and I are working up multi-species phylogeographic studies of birds across the Albertine Rift, based the Bird Division's long term research throughout the region.  We are working up similar data sets for Malawian birds.  Our current NSF Dimensions of Diversity grant on the assembly of the Amazonian biota and our NSF grant to survey birds and their parasites across the southern Amazon are generating genomic data for analysis in collaboration with paleoecologists, climatologists, geologists, and remote sensing experts from the U.S. and Brazil.  These large collaborative projects are providing new perspectives on the history of Amazonia.

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