8
UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 3 JUNE, 2018
LIFE SCIENCES: BARCANT BUTTERFLY COLLECTION
How do you make a museum specimen useful?
Putting it on display and letting visitors come and
look would probably be the most common answer.
Although it’s true that this helps with education
and hopefully inspires a love of nature, the scientific
usefulness is still lacking. A good scientific specimen
is one which has lots of information: what species it
is, where and when it was collected, who collected it
along with any other details. However, it only really
becomes a useful specimen when that information is
easily accessible.
For example, if a researcher from the U.K. is
studying a particular species of butterfly that is only
found in Trinidad and they want to know which
museums have specimens, it could take them a long
time to track down every relevant museum collection.
They might have to visit many collections all over the
world, or these days, search through online records
(if available!), then contact curators who would then
have to go through their collections and find the
correct specimen and then pass that information back
to the researcher. All this could take months of work.
It would be much easier if there were a single source
of easily accessible online information that covered
all museum collections and other species occurrence
records. Fortunately there is - the Global Biodiversity
Information Facility (GBIF for short).
Last year The University of the West Indies
Zoology Museum (UWIZM) partnered with the
National Zoological Collection of Suriname and the
Barbados Museum and Historical Society in a project
titled Improving biodiversity data accessibility in the
Caribbean countries of Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados
and Suriname.This project was fundedby the European
Union through the GBIF - Biodiversity Information
for Development (BID) programme. The purpose of
the project is to upload the biological records currently
housed in these museum collections onto the GBIF
platform and to encourage and help other collections
in the region to share their data as well.
The funding given to the UWIZM was used to
employ a database assistant responsible for converting
and uploading the museum records. These records are
then publicly available for anyone to search – you can
have a look for a particular species or study a certain
place and see what has been found there in the past.
As of May 2018, the GBIF site has over 981,500,000
occurrence records frommore than 1,100 institutions
worldwide and these numbers are growing all the time.
As well as uploading the UWIZMs records, we will
also be sharing species records from other collections.
Some of these are physically housed in the UWIZM,
such as the Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences
International (CABI), Caribbean Epidemiology Centre
(CAREC) and the National Museum of Trinidad &
Tobago zoological collections, but there are other
zoological collections in Trinidad such as the Barcant
Butterfly Collection (BBC) at the House of Angostura
Museum.
This well-known collection of thousands of
preserved butterflies was bought by Angostura in 1974
from the collector Malcolm Barcant and has been a
prized possession ever since. The BBC is overseen by
Giselle Laronde-West, Senior Manager of Hospitality
and Communications, and Ronda Betancourt, Public
Relations Officer. Although they have done a great job
of displaying and promoting the BBC, they don’t have
the zoological experience tomake the most of the data,
so a few years ago they invited the UWIZM to help
Making Museum
Specimens Useful
UWIZM, GBIF and the Barcant Butterfly Collection
B Y M I K E G . R U T H E R F O R D
Curator of the UWIZM
catalogue the butterflies. The collection information
associated with each butterfly is carefully placed next
to each specimen in a label and is also contained in
Barcant’s book Butterflies of Trinidad And Tobago.
Unfortunately this book is out of print and copies are
rare, so sharing the data online is the best way to make
it accessible.
Pauline Geerah, an on-the-job trainee attached to
the UWIZM for two years, and I collated previously
taken photographs of the butterflies and then Pauline
spent much of her time transcribing the collection data
from the thousands of tiny hand-written labels into a
spreadsheet. This was then uploaded to the UWIZM’s
database along with a photo of each specimen. Renoir
Auguste, the GBIF database assistant, then took these
records and transformed the data into the correct
format for uploading to GBIF. This involved adding
geographic coordinates for each record and making
sure that the species names were the most up-to-date
available. Once the more than 4,000 records were
ready, they were uploaded and are now accessible to
anyone with access to a computer, making them truly
useful.
To see the butterfly records, visit
,
click on Datasets and search for Barcant Butterfly
Collection (the collection has been split into six family
groups). You can zoom in on the map of Trinidad
& Tobago to see what species were found where or
look through the lists to discover rare and common
butterflies.
To see the butterflies themselves you’ll need to
arrange a tour of the House of Angostura. Visit www.
angostura.com/tours/ for more information.
Finally, if you would like to visit the UWI Zoology
Museum to see thousands of other animals specimens,
come toTheUniversity of theWest Indies, St. Augustine
campus fromMonday to Friday between 9amand 4pm
and ring the doorbell or email uwizoologymuseum@
sta.uwi.edu
to arrange
a date and time.
This is a section of one of the more than 120 drawers in the Barcant Butterfly Collection.
PHOTO BY RICHARD ACOSTA
