Madelaine Katz catches a perfect day at Oceanside

Ever since I was very small, I’ve been enraptured by the animal kingdom. And I was very lucky: My mom fueled this fire by taking me to as many zoos, aquariums, wildlife centers and nature parks as possible on our family travels. It was a big part of my upbringing. Now, as a semi-autonomous and somewhat-functioning adult, I still manage to find ways to go to these places as much as humanly possible.

The most recent of these visits was to the Oregon Coast Aquarium.

After the exhausting whirlwind that was my START orientation at Oregon State this summer, I was feeling a little bit panicked about the whole moving-across-the-continent-for-college ordeal. Being a native East Coaster from North Carolina, the move to Oregon was going to be quite a shift for me. I was excited, yes, but a heavy dose of nerves was definitely there too. And what was the one thing that could make me feel myself?

“Dad, can we drive out to Newport? There’s an aquarium there!”

And so we did. It was mostly empty on that sleepy Wednesday afternoon, and I happily roamed around the exhibits, lost and immersed in my own underwater world.

Rounding the corner from some dozing sea otters, I approached my favorite animal, the Great Pacific Octopus. As I walked toward the tank, however, a disgruntled family was heading in the opposite direction, expressing frustration. “Why didn’t it come out?” they were complaining. “Why was it hiding in a hole like that?”

As they made their way noisy way out, I slowly walked up to the glass window of the octopus’ tank. It would appear completely devoid of life if it were not for the single, telltale tentacle spilling out from a small dark crevice in the corner.

Even though I couldn’t see more than this lone tentacle, a flood of simple respect washed over me for this incredible creature. The intelligence of these mollusks is legendary among biologists. I’ve heard many a story of their cunning and wit, whether it be outsmarting predatory sharks three times their size, or figuring out how to make a coconut shell a useful tool for shelter. I closed my eyes and placed my hand on the glass, and smiled to myself. I was, and still am, in love with the fact that these animals exist in the world.

I sighed, and opened my eyes. And splayed out on the bottom of the tank, big and bold and totally orange, was the octopus, come out from hiding in its watery cave. And I swear it was looking at me.

Some part of me will always doubt it, but the larger and more playful side of me believes that the animal felt what I was feeling and came out to say hello, or at least to investigate. A volunteer told me later that the nocturnal octopus rarely comes out during the day, and that I was lucky to be able to witness it.

Lucky, yes.  I felt wonderfully lucky to be able to share that moment with that phenomenal cephalopod. But was it happenstance? Who knows, but that creature sure had a wonderful effect on me, and maybe, just maybe, I had a similar effect on him.

Madelaine Katz is a freshman in the University Honors College majoring in zoology.

Carabids

But first, a few more details. And no, I wasn’t exploring some sort of bizarre insect cemetery. I was visiting the Oregon State Arthropod Collection (OSAC), a misleadingly commonplace room on the fourth floor of Cordley Hall on OSU’s main campus. Though minimally advertised, this organismal library is comprised of cabinets with boxes full of arthropods, carefully preserved and delicately pinned into place. Remove the lids to those boxes, and the collection flashes to life with bright colors: metallic glimmerings of beetle exoskeletons, satiny blue shimmers of butterfly wings.

The collection ranges from breath-taking to bizarre, like the eye-catching tarantula. While intimidating, the giant spider is much less of a threat when perfectly preserved and floating in a glass jar. OSAC hosts the largest collection of Pacific Northwest insects in the world, while also including many other arthropods such as spiders and scorpions.

So why doesn’t everyone know about OSAC? First of all, it serves the scientific community by providing a resource to researchers in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. In a monumental effort to make the collection more accessible online, staff members are digitizing the entire collection. In addition to these services, OSAC occasionally collects its own specimens when time and funding allows, adding material to its holdings yearly.

Open Access

The museum is open to the public by appointment but focuses on meeting the needs of visitors with research-related questions. And unlike a giant exhibition museum, there is no admission charge.

pentatomidae

“There’s a strength that comes from being a small, regional collection with a really great legacy and history,” says Chris Marshall, curator and manager for the collection. “While we’re not currently out collecting samples , we’re seeking to help other groups who are doing work like that, and they can reciprocate by depositing material.”

This function highlights the importance of regional collections. OSAC allows researchers to go beyond the limitations of field guides. For example, when conservationists with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation needed to acquaint themselves with a specific butterfly before surveying it in the wild, they came to OSAC for help. By directly observing the butterflies in OSAC’s collection, the conservationists learned how to recognize the species they were going to study. Further enriching the resource, labels on the specimens told them when and where to look for the butterfly.

“For these conservationists, one of the first steps toward understanding how to preserve them is learning how to recognize them,” Marshall points out. “A photograph in a field guide is just not the same as seeing twenty preserved butterflies in a drawer.”

In the future, researchers can look back at these records and see how butterfly populations have changed. In much the same way, OSAC’s collection of arthropods, which includes specimens at least a century old, is a physical representation of past conditions. Scientists can look at an insect and its label and know where it was at a certain time.

What We’ve Lost

Collections are the historical records of science, playing an especially vital role in conservation. If we don’t know how things once were, how can we know that anything is different? Robert Pyle, founder of the Xerces Society, correlates the loss of species with the impoverishment of human knowledge, what he calls the “extinction of experience.” It’s an unconscious lowering of standards.

Ornithoptera

This is a concept that Randy Olson, a scientist and filmmaker, features in his project, Shifting Baselines. “Shifting baselines” is “the failure to notice change,” says Olson. His project focuses on marine conservation, but the general idea can be applied to any environment. Olson describes the beautiful, vibrant nature of Jamaican coral reefs in the 1970s. He cites Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who says that coral bleaching and overfishing have now reduced these corals to algae-covered messes.

That’s where shifting baselines come into play. If Jackson hadn’t kept records, if that colorful coral reef were not his baseline, who would know it had ever existed? Our present day baseline would be a lack of corals, and slowly, our concept of the world before human interference would grow unclear.

Baseline of Bugs

With its stockpile of preserved arthropods, OSAC is creating a baseline of its own. Many species are in decline, and should extinction happen, OSAC provides the means to see what we have lost. Its role in arthropod surveys also contributes to record-keeping.

“We don’t have the arrogance to say we’re the best collection in the country by any means,” Marshall adds. This may be true in terms of numbers; the Smithsonian has over 35 million specimens. But for the Pacific Northwest, there couldn’t be a more important arthropod collection.

Oregon may seem to be brimming with insects today, but how does that compare to fifty years ago? Think how it will compare to fifty years from now.

As I walked out of OSU’s impressive arthropod collection, I imagined a hypothetical day when Oregon’s great insect biodiversity might be limited to the confines of that room. Despite my youthful aversion to “bugs,” I would hate to see them gone for good.