BOO!! If you follow us on Instagram, then you’ve seen that for the month of October we featured an especially spooky specimen in all of our pictures. As today is Halloween, I think we are all a little more aware of things that… shall we say… go bump in the night? One of those things…
Read MoreDances with Leeches
Yep…Leeches! This summer, as Dr. Bronwyn Williams and I were planning our annual excursion to New England to collect crayfish for an ongoing pet project of mine, I was told Anna Phillips, Research Zoologist and Curator of Parasitic and Gummi Worms1, at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, wanted to join us, because…
Read MoreThe Grapes of the Western Flyer
A survey of the Gulf of California 40 years after the collection event which lead to the book: The Log from the Sea of Cortez In March of 1940, John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts ventured with a crew of six from Monterey, California to the Gulf of California in Mexico. The goal of this journey…
Read MoreSaucy Shrimp of South Carolina
On June 18th, 1812, the President of the United States of America declared war on Great Britain in what is now known as the War of 1812. Nearly 2 months later, on August 6th, a private boat by the name of the “Saucy Jack” was launched off the coast of South Carolina and used to…
Read MoreBryowhatza??
While crayfish may win the award for most lots in the NCSM NMI collection, the group bryozoans is a little bit harder to quantify. Considering there are about 5,000 known species living today, we have comparatively few lots actually representing the phylum Bryozoa – the real trick is: how many lots contain bryozoans? This is a…
Read MoreEastward Bound
In the year 1966, Star Trek debuted, gas was 32 cents per gallon (wouldn’t that be nice…), the Vietnam War (and accompanying protests) was in full swing, and a small crew of scientists was on an oceanography expedition off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia, almost to Bermuda. This crew was made up of…
Read MoreCray-zy about Crayfish!
For our first specimen feature post, it seems only fitting that we are launching our #1001jars blog with a post about crayfishes. Why? Because we are cray-zy about crayfish in our lab! Crayfishes occupy a broad, yet patchy global distribution, with more than 660 described species spanning both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Nearly 500…
Read MoreWelcome to 1001 Jars!
Do you ever think about what goes on behind the scenes of a natural history or science museum?? We visit science museums all the time, but we never really stop to think about what had to happen for those beautifully informative exhibits to come to fruition. That information, those specimens, all had to come from…
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