April 3 - Queensland Museum
The Queensland Museum, mostly a museum of Natural History, is just over
the river from our hotel in downtown Brisbane. The central part of the city, like Sydney, is a mixture of
old and new architecture, with a pleasant, if busy, pedestrianized Queen Street running through its heart. Plenty
of restaurants, pubs, and shops. Even at rush hour the pace seems more relaxed than your average city. There is
a genuine international feel to Brisbane both in terms of its peoples and its cuisine. Anglo-western, Thai, Chinese,
Japanese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Indian and so on. No apparent aboriginal influence though, which is too bad
because apparently the settlement of the region was peacable with the local inhabitants (to begin with anyway).
Our task at the Museum is a fairly straightforward one: find the type specimens for
those species that are on record here, photograph them and record all of the label information in their
respective jars. A type specimen is that individual animal that defines the species, the one upon which the
species was described, and the one upon which ultimate comparisons can and must be made if trying to decide
whether or not some critter found in the woods is this species, that species or a new species. All species
have a type specimen somewhere. The type of Giraffe giraffe is wrapped in gauze standing in the bottom
of a stairwell in the British Museum of Natural History in South Kensington London, for example.
Some in our field want to do away with this proceure of designating types, thinking it to be an arcane, even parochial, practise. Others see that there is something critically important to being able to accurately and unambiguously identify species. Regardless, the Natural History Museums of the world are the libraries of biodiversity in the form of these type collections, and other collections.
There is much to be gleaned from collections. For example, just by looking at
the holotype of Amicobdella niger (at right), which we will be hunting in earnest two days from now,
we have a good sense of size, shape, and patterning of colors on the back. Of course the colors are faded
considerably after years in formalin and alcohol; all the more reason for our field shots of terrestrial leeches.
As well, though, among the non-type collections there is a wealth of information, most of it never having
made it to a published paper, all of which concerns the precise localities at which various leeches have been found, some of them
identified to species, others not.
We have downloaded all of this information from the QM databases and have
jotted down notes of our own from the labels themselves. The information from the types will be compiled, along
with similar information we have gathered from leech collections at museums around the world, into a single
on-line source. The task of digitially recording the information contained for all of the type and non-type collections
of all of the plants and animals in all of the museums and herbaria around the world is an onerous one. But this
is being done, and not just by us. The information is too precious to be subject to the fading effects of
that inevitably degrade ink on paper labels gingerly placed in jars by avid collectors the world over.
Alas, the only wildlife we have seen, excepting the odd drunken backpaker
staggering back to "The Palace", are the ibises that here supplant pidgeons as the earnest beggars around
your lunch table, and a lone lizard well out of place on the river bank surrounded by concrete, glass, steel and
curious tourists.
Tomorrow is our last day in Southeast Queensland before flying North to Darwin. Still no rain to speak of. We might try a locality up near the Sunshine Coast, or maybe just pop into Steve Irwin's Australian Zoo along the way.