Back with a Buzz

Hey Everyone! We've been on a bit of a blogging hiatus with our department, which is due to how busy our summer has been this year. One grant down, two manuscripts being finished, two ExplorOlogy trips completed with some fantastic kids, and soon to be two workshops in Gainesville, Florida and Ann Arbor, Michigan in August and September, respectively, mean a busy summer will continue ahead!
    We do have two new announcements for our department that we are really excited about: we have a new graduate student, Brent, who will be helping us with our shell accessions this year, and we hired a new full-time Collection Manager, Andy! Both will be starting in August, so we'll be able to accomplish even more in revitalizing our collection.
    Brent, who is doing research on mercury levels in freshwater mollusks here in Oklahoma, will help us with his mollusk knowledge to recurrate and incorporate two new collections into our main shell collection. We received two major donations recently: the Mathers collection of shells collected in the United States, and the Perry Yates Jackson collection of shells collected in the United States and across the world. We also will hopefully hire an undergraduate student to help him with the Jackson collection and gain some experience learning mollusk taxonomy and curation, so we'll have a dynamic duo tackling our bivalves and snails shortly! We're also hoping to write a bit more about these exciting donations this fall as we learn more about the snails and mollusks we're getting.

Cataloged and sorted shells from the Jackson Collection. Notice the care taken to get them identified!

     Andy has a PhD in the systematics of parasitic hymenoptera (wasps that lay eggs in other animals, mostly insects) and will be taking over a lot of the duties that are critical to our department, such as maintaining the collection, managing our staff and students, accessions and loan information, our departmental catalog and records, education activities...the list goes on and on! With his expertise in wasps and other insects he'll also be a huge asset to our collection, museum, and state as a resident expert for the group. Andy will also be helping us out with fieldwork and outreach events, especially Bioblitzes, so that we can have our taxonomic expertise available for Oklahomans. We're really looking forward to having him be a part of our team.
     So those are the big events that are coming up for next month. Next week, however, look for a post about our adventures with ExplorOlogy, and integrating Recent Invertebrates with learning about the scientific method!