From cryogenic freezers to butterflies pinned up and trapped behind glass — the Museum of Southwestern Biology (MSB) opened its doors to the public Sunday for the second time.
MSB hosted the second annual Open Collections Event for the public on March 8, from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.
The Museum is a research facility within the Department of Biology at the University of New Mexico, with research done by both students and faculty.
Self-lead tours ranging from one to two hours took place throughout the day via online reservation.
Visitors were introduced with a welcome video and then encouraged to travel throughout the building and look at the different collections. A scavenger hunt was also handed out at check-in with the chance to enter a drawing for an MSB shirt.
Students, faculty and volunteers positioned at the various divisions of specimens that were displayed spoke about what they were and how the specimens pertain to research. The collections that were on display are used for research by students and faculty.
“This is something people don’t even realize we have here in New Mexico,” Rebecca Allen, a junior in the department, said.
This event created friendships for students with the public, and occasionally grants and funding for their research.
“The goal is to expand their networks in the community,” Christopher Witt, professor and director of MSB said.
The department also highlighted its biodiversity research in honor of International Women’s Day, which happened to coincide with the event.
In coincidental complement to this, MSB recently hired its first two female faculty-curators: Dr. Lisa Barrow, curator of amphibians and reptiles, and Dr. Hannah Marx, curator of the herbarium plant collection.
The curator position was established in 1938, which Witt said he still considers a fairly new position.
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“It’s a small sample size but it’s reflective of the gender-bias in science,” Witt said.
The event originated from “Research Day” that the department held every year, with a traditional reception afterward.
“This was an opportunity for students working on biology projects to showcase their work,” Witt said.
Eventually, the department decided to add the public to it since it was such a major effort to put on. The public received the event well, and the line of visitors trailed out the door for the Open Collections Event in 2019.
“We wanted to share it beyond our biology community,” Witt said.
Very few students actually attended the event and Witt said it is instead targeted at “a subset of the Albuquerque citizenry that loves natural history and learning how life works.”
Since there was the large wave of visitors in 2019, MSB experimented with online reservations this year at 15-minute intervals to filter guests in.
This event only happens once a year and is expected to stay that way.
“We love to show off what we do but we can’t let it get in the way of our excellence,” Witt said.
Students and faculty in the department travel all over the world collecting specimens to further improve the university’s ability to do research.
“We are very efficient here about prioritizing every dollar to our core goals, which are building the collections and getting the students to leverage them for their careers,” Witt said.
This open house consisted of nine divisions of animal and plant specimens from the Southwest as well as other countries: amphibians and reptiles, arthropods, birds, fishes, genomic resources, mammals, parasites and plants.
“We have a good sense of what (these collections) are good for today but we have no idea what they’ll be good for in the future,” Dr. Michael Anderson, assistant professor and curator of genomic resources and associate curator of birds, said in explanation to the preservation efforts.
Suggested donations were taken at the door, going toward funding for running the collections facility.
Megan Gleason is a freelance reporter for the Daily Lobo. She can be contacted at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @fabflutist2716
