The Daily Lobo talked to the Museum of Southwestern Biology to get updates on how it’s doing amid the COVID-19 pandemic along with the start of school coming up.
The Museum of Southwestern Biology continues their focus on research and education through their collections rather than public exhibitions.
This Q&A addresses current and future happenings at the museum with director Christopher Witt.
Q: Can you discuss the museum’s current and future operations?
CW: With respect to COVID, we’re in a real state of transition, I think, as everybody is right now, where we’re just figuring things out in the new reality with the vaccine mandate and the start of the semester. So everybody’s a little on edge and kind of cautiously optimistic right now, I think. But it’s also sort of scary with the new wave of the (COVID-19) delta variant so everything feels a little bit up in the air at this moment.
But in the big picture, the long-time picture, for the Museum of Southwestern Biology is steady improvement. And, I mean, the museum is about 100 years old; it was really founded in 1938 but some of the collections go back a little further than that and if you look at the long history of that, it’s just gotten better and better and better and the growth is exponential, and the scientific applications have grown and really picked up in the last year.
And the recognition from the scientific community of the importance of having biodiversity collections available to researchers is really gratifying. It’s really picked up in the last five years even — the wide recognition that museums are essential to the life sciences. (We’ve) got to have collections if we’re going to understand things like change over time and variation in life across geography and lots of other related questions, so we feel really gratified that we’re recognized as being really important in the sort of overall field of biology.
Q: How does your staff feel working with the University’s COVID-19 regulations and during the pandemic overall?
CW: Man that's a good question. I mean, I don’t think there’s any one view. I think everybody's been frustrated and complained and it's been challenging no matter what your view of it is, and we know it’s been challenging from the leadership perspective.
I think we felt like we were almost out of the woods because (UNM proposed) a vaccine mandate and we thought we’d be able to return to sort of a semi-normal workload in August and then we were hit with the backpedaling with the vaccine mandate that happened in July, and we thought ‘Oh no, that’s really going to threaten our ability to come back to normal.’ Now, fortunately, things have changed and we have the vaccine mandate, but COVID has taken a turn for the worse.
So I think everyone’s kind of hardened by this process; we feel battered by this and it’s been really hard to plan. But I don’t know, I personally feel that I know it’s been a long winding process but I think that the UNM administration is maybe getting better at handling this. And I’m kind of optimistic that we have a good plan in place for the fall and I think it’s sort of a reflection of what’s happening nationally.
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The vaccine is catching on — like the data, the support of the vaccine is so good that the anti-vaccine position is becoming less and less tenable and I think you’re seeing cracks in that giant anti-vax community. And so I think we’re moving in the right direction so (I have) just a general optimism. And I think people that have seen the museum’s operations and collections wax and wane over time know that we’ll be back.
This pandemic is really, in a way, helpful to get the public to understand why biodiversity collections are important because obviously you can have diseases like this jump out of animal populations to human populations; we should know where the diseases are in animal populations. And I think that people are kind of shocked to know that we don’t know where all of the animal viruses are and that’s kind of a wake-up call to the state of biodiversity science.
We’re just scratching the surface — there’s not enough people, not enough resources in this and there’s too much diversity out there. We really don't have a handle on where all of these animal diseases are and which ones can jump to humans so it’s just a matter of having underinvested in that research infrastructure over the years.
But at least our collections (at UNM) are part of the investments that were made for that. And there are people screening our tissue collections right now for coronaviruses to try to help understand what the diversity is that’s out there and in what species and what areas geographically and whatnot.
Q: Do you have any current collections or future collections that particularly stand out to you?
CW: We have phenomenal collections. Our premiere collection is the mammal collection and this is something that everybody at UNM should know about because it’s the second-largest mammal collection in the world, after the Smithsonian. But it’s growing at a rate that's about ten times as fast as the Smithsonian so it's far more important scientifically than their collection so I think it’s the best one in the world; but by the numbers, it's the second largest.
And it is an enormous effort to acquire and process (and) archive all of these materials per year because they grow by 10 or 20 thousand … And then they serve those animals to researchers and that leads to about a hundred scientific publications every year based on their collection so they’re driving this massive scientific effort to understand wild mammals and their diversity, their genomics, their diseases, their population health, all these different things that we need to know about.
And it’s a very unique resource. It takes a lot of resources to maintain it and to build it. But people over at UNM over the years have had the vision to do that where people at other institutions haven’t; you know, that’s just why we have it. It’s the vision of some individuals that knew it would be important, that knew it would be worth that massive effort.
So I think if there’s one thing people should know about the strength of our museum, it's the mammal collection, and that's tied together with our frozen tissue collection. A huge portion of those — over 300,000 mammals that they have — are paired with frozen samples that are preserved in liquid nitrogen cryostorage in a state-of-the-art facility that we have for storing wild animal tissue samples.
Q: Do you have anything else you’d like to tell the community?
CW: I think that I would like to tell the community that COVID is a disease that emerged from animal viruses and we’ve got to support natural history collections if we’re going to understand animal viruses and be able to predict and prevent and manage pandemics.
Megan Gleason is the Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Lobo. She can be contacted at editorinchief@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @fabflutist2716
