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Hardshell clams from the Indo-Pacific (L) and western Mexico (R)

Invertebrate Zoology brings together a broad range of systematic and methodological expertise, including all aspects of research and collection management dealing with nonvertebrate animals at the American Museum of Natural History.

The current systematic strengths of the Division’s staff are in the areas of terrestrial arthropod systematics, marine mollusks, and the Annelida, especially leeches. Methodologically the Division has long been strong in the application and refinement of phylogenetic methods. More recently it has become a leader in DNA sequencing and sequence analysis, fostering research that led to the establishing of the Institute for Comparative Genomics.

The Division has a proven record of training doctoral students through cooperative programs with the City University of New York, Columbia University, Cornell University, and Yale University.

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South American shore bugs

Collection acquisition within the Division started in 1869, the year the American Museum of Natural History was founded. Growth since that time has been nearly continuous. At the beginning of the 21st century the collections of insects, spiders, and mollusks dominate the Division collection in terms of size and scope.

The insects are the largest group of living organisms, with approximately one million described species. No single collection is reflective of total insect diversity, but several groups are particularly well represented at the Museum. Among these is the termite (Isoptera) collection, built by Alfred Emerson and Kumar Krishna, which contains about 90 percent of all described species with a very high percentage of primary types. The true bug collection (Heteroptera)is not only extremely large, but notable for its family-level diversity and its extensive holdings of primitive bugs and Cimicomorpha. The collections of rove beetles (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae) and inch-worm moths (Lepidoptera: Geometridae) contain extensive holdings, particularly from the New World, of these two very large and diverse groups of insects. The bee collection (Hymenoptera: Apoidea) has tremendous depth from all continental areas except Australia. Other groups such as butterflies and true flies are also represented by world-class holdings.

The Museum also has the most important research holdings of insects fossilized in amber. This collection contains primarily the oldest known ambers, those from the Cretaceous, a pivotal period in the origin and diversification of terrestrial ecosystems.

Among other groups of terrestrial arthropods, the Museum’s spider collection is the largest in the world, and is worldwide in scope, with many additions based on field collecting in Chile, Argentina, Australia, and New Caledonia.

The Recent mollusk collection is estimated to be the fifth largest worldwide. It contains approximately 3.5 million specimens, with at least 80 percent of all known species for several important families. The collection is worldwide in scope, but strongest in its representation of western Atlantic and tropical Pacific marine species, including one of the best-preserved specimens of giant squid, Architeuthis kirki Robson, 1887, in existence.

Among all remaining invertebrates, the Division maintains catalogued collections for over 30 major groups. The largest of these are the holdings for Crustacea (which includes lobsters and crabs), Cnidaria (which includes jellyfish, sea anemones, and corals), and Echinodermata (which includes starfish and sea urchins), although substantial collections exist even for rare phyla like the Tardigrada and Hemichordata. There is also significant material for parasitic groups in light of the historically important cestode, trematode, and acanthocephalan collections made by Horace Stunkard and Harold Kirby’s unparalleled flagellated protist collection. Current research is focused on increasing the depth of global sampling of leech groups both for standard and frozen tissue collections.

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Compact collections storage

The Division maintains state-of-the-art collection facilities in three main areas. First is the pinned-insect collection, a compactor-based facility of about 6,000 square feet that houses more than 10 million specimens. Completed in 1992, this unit allows for a coherent arrangement of about 60 percent of the dry specimens. The insects are housed in a drawer-and-unit system in nearly 900 air-tight cabinets mounted on 60 moveable carriages.

The recently completed C. V. Starr Natural Science Building houses the Invertebrate Zoology alcohol-preserved collections in a 4,000-square-foot compactor facility with an adjoining laboratory area. The more than 700 cases in the unit allow for well-organized and secure storage in an environment of stable temperature and humidity.

A new frozen tissue collection, the Ambrose Monell Collection for Molecular and Microbial Research, opened in early 2001. It has the capacity to store many tens of thousands of frozen samples in liquid-nitrogen-cooled vats. This facility, critical to the work of the Institute for Comparative Genomics, will allow for the long-term preservation of samples for DNA sequencing.

DNA centrifuges

Also integral to the Institute is the Division’s state-of-the-art DNA sequencing laboratory. Automated and robot-controlled amplification and sequencing equipment allow for the acquisition of massive amounts of data, on a scale unheard of as little as five years ago.

Virtually unique among Division resources is a massive parallel computing cluster. This facility was built for use in the phylogenetic analysis of DNA sequence data, a computationally most intensive activity. Using special software, this "machine" allows us to solve problems that would otherwise take years of computation or mainframe-style supercomputers of the types used only by the Department of Defense and other U.S. government agencies.

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