asteiid drawer

The “new” collection of flies from Utah State University has arrived, and what a collection it is! The number of specimens and some of the cool species among the material surpasses my wildest dreams. Of course, we gave up a great collection to obtain this material, as documented in my previous blog (“Fly Specialization at the LACM”), but these new Diptera holdings are mesmerizing to me.

For example, in an earlier blog I wrote about finding the unusual family Asteiidae here on the Museum grounds. The supply was only our second specimens in the entire collection, yet look at the holdings from Utah State University! Half the tightly packed drawer of them-I guess they are not so rare after all.

tons of tachinids

More superlatives: seven drawers jammed with unsorted fungus gnats. Lots of tachinids (parasitic flies): about 40 unsorted drawers of them!

There was even a family new to our collection- the southeast Asian Nothybiidae. They look like a school of minnows heading upstream in the unit tray.

school of nothybiids

That’s the thing about this collection: most of it is unsorted and therefore full of potential for new species. As an example, amongst the phorids was the first-ever specimen of the genus Cyrtophorina from Central America, a new species of the previously well-known genus Anevrina from Mexico, and a few things that are just weird and unidentifiable to me at this time.

To be sure, this is a collection that only a dipterist would love (and some people I show these photos to shudder in dismay), but part of the incentive for doing this exchange was to stimulate interest in the LACM fly holdings. Hopefully, this brief report will help do so,

We are doing something a little daring, but certainly exciting here at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. We have decided to specialize on flies.

drawer of unsorted flies from the LACM collection

Why would we do this (besides because we are obsessed)? Most insect collections are comprehensive, trying to house as big a variety of all groups as possible. Basically, we want to to become one of the best Diptera collections in the country, or even the world. You can’t do that unless you are ready to give up something else. For us, it is future growth in non-target groups, like butterflies and beetles. We’ll take care of what we have, but we are not accepting any more.

An even more radical version of the specialization involves exchanging away non-Diptera parts of the collection. To do this, you need to find other like-minded institutions that wish to grow in a similar way. In our case, we found a first partner in the Utah State University, especially with Dr. James Pitts. There, Dr. Wilford Hansen has built an excellent collection of mostly Neotropical Diptera. The current staff of their entomology department, however, is more interested in Hymenoptera, and this spring we are doing a large-scale exchange of USU Diptera for LACM Hymenoptera (exclusive of ants and bees).

This exchange includes about 600 drawers of material on each side. It more than doubles our holdings of general Diptera, not including our already major collections of Phoridae, Blephariceridae, and Neotropical Psychodidae. It also makes USU a major Hymenoptera collection, a truly win-win arrangement.

Exchanges can quickly change the face of the collection, but they are expensive. Moving 600 drawers to Logan, Utah, and bringing same number back to Los Angeles will cost about $4000 and lots of staff time. Still, this is much less money than that required to build a 600 drawer collection from scratch, and we are thrilled by it.

I foresee the possibility of more such exchanges in the future for the LACM, and welcome inquiries from curators who feel that such an arrangement would benefit their collections as well.