BRTC

Another bit from our WFSC undergraduate intern Lauren Wimbish, this time she’s in our collection of bats organizing their skins and skulls-

This past June I spent many hours reorganizing the bat collection at the BRTC. Bats are mammals that belong to the Order Chiroptera, which is the second largest mammal group (only rodents belong to a more diverse Order). They are also the only mammals that are capable of sustaining true flight. The collection consists of many different species of bats from all over the world, but mostly the specimens are from the Americas. Reorganizing each case consisted of going through each drawer and making sure the specimens were in alphabetical order by family, genus, species, and geographic locality. Each drawer would contain at least one family of bats. The bats within that family were alphabetically placed by species name and geographic region within that same species. Usually, each case had about 12-15 drawers and would take roughly an hour to go through. Most of the specimens I organized were fairly small and did not vary much in size. While shuffling through the bats I would always put my headphones in and enjoy some music to help give a relaxing work setting.  On days when the air conditioning was struggling to cool the building this was especially necessary. Texas summers can be pretty brutal, even inside. On a few occasions my work lead me outside and I would have to tough it out in the Texas heat.

Hi! My name is Lauren Wimbish and I am a Wildlife and Fisheries Science major at Texas A&M University. Part of my experience here at Texas A&M is having an internship. This past summer I worked as an intern at the Biodiversity Research and Teaching Collections (BRTC). Although I have had multiple classes at the BRTC, such as Natural History of Vertebrates, Mammalogy and currently Ornithology, this past May was my first time working within the collections. For a good chunk of May and June, I spent a fair amount of time working in the mammal alcohol collection. These are fully intact specimens that are put into jars filled with alcohol to preserve them. The mammal collection has about 12,000 specimens preserved in alcohol and when I began my journey of organizing them I started on rodents. I primarily worked with different species of rats and mice and occasionally a gopher. There also are many other mammals in the collections besides rodents, such as bats, felines, and my favorite: a Pronghorn Antelope. My main task working in the mammal alcohol collection was to assess what was in each jar. I would get a jar and take out each specimen; some jars would have one or two specimens while others would have 20 or 30. I would take every specimen out of the jar and then essentially check to make sure it is where our records say it should be. If anything was off/missing, I would make a note for the curator so corrections could be made later.  The work was generally quiet and slow. So most days when I would come in I would put in my headphones and listen to some music while I would go into my own little place for a few hours. The cool part of doing this was getting to see all the little differences in the species.  Some of them have had large amounts of tissue samples taken from them, so not every specimen was perfect per se. Some of the internal organs were exposed in these not-so-perfect specimens. One of the coolest things I recall was being able to see the fetal offspring in some of the female rats. Not every day was as exciting as when I saw the fetal rats.  On days that were moving a little slow I would mix things up by working with the collection of bats we store in cases.