ZOOLOGY COLLECTIONS

If you want to research how populations of native animals have been changed by human impacts such as climate change, one of the first ports of call is a museum zoology collection.

Some significant zoology collections extend back as far as scientific collecting began and they continue to be replenished today. Often held by museums or universities, they are a trove of essential reference material for researchers.

In Victoria the Museums Victoria zoology collection began in the 1850s. It has specimens from all around the world but specialises in animals found in South-Eastern Australia, particularly in Victoria. The collection paints a scientific picture of the distribution of animals in Victoria past and present, where they live, how they live, which ones are rare, which ones are common and which are extinct.

Pictured here are mounted specimens of the Little Pied Cormorant (Microcarbo melanoleucos), a common waterbird. The specimen on the left was donated to Museums Victoria at its formation in 1854. Taxidermic specimens mounted for display and study were very popular in the 19 century. These specimens still play an important role in communication and science but have been supplemented by other types of collection objects as our scientific understanding of biology has changed, new tools such as genetic analysis have been developed, and the role of the museum itself has evolved.

This Thylacine specimen of a pouch young was collected in 1808, over 200 years ago. In 2017 the Thylacine genome was sequenced from this specimen yielding new insights into its evolution, distribution and development.

A zoology collection encompasses marine animals and land (terrestrial) animals, animals with backbones (vertebrates) and those without (invertebrates). It includes fish, mammals, birds, reptiles, frogs, insects, spiders, crustaceans, molluscs and more.

Animal specimens can be kept ‘wet’ where the full animal or a tissue sample is stored in big jars of alcohol, or ‘dry’ where the specimen has been mounted for display, pinned on a board (insects) or kept for study as a skin or as a skeleton. While zoology collections inevitably require dead animal specimens as important scientific reference points, increasingly museums are storing deep frozen genetic and biological samples collected in the field without harming the animal from which it is taken.

Zoology collections also include researcher field notes and research data, geographical coordinates, drawings, photographs, video and audio recordings, samples of a particular animal’s standard diet, samples of its poo, samples of eggs, nests, shelters and an array of other things related to understanding animal life across time and space.

This is a ‘wet’ or spirit specimen of a baby Thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger, young enough to have still been in the pouch. The Thylacine, a dog-like marsupial with a band of tigerish stripes on its back, was once widespread across mainland Australia and New Guinea but by the time of European colonisation was only found in a remnant population in Tasmania. It became extinct in the early 20 century due to habitat destruction through the establishment of colonial farms, through being hunted for bounties as they were believed to be a pest, and disease.

Unlike humanities collections, where the collections are large but might hold lots of items that are quite different and are chosen because they symbolize an era or a person or an event, scientific collections have a different rationale in the way they are collected.

They gain value based on how extensively they sample the natural world and so may hold many specimens of the same species collected at different locations or at different points in time. These objects are important for the data contained within them and alongside them, and as reference points. And the more regularly scientific collections are added to over time, the more valuable they become as a resource to understand change.

One of the most important specimens kept by museums are the 'type' specimens. Type specimens are the biological examples which define a species and against which all other examples are compared. The process of scientifically identifying a new species involves publishing a scientific paper illustrating its unique features and explaining its relationship to other known species. The individual specimen which is used by a scientist in this process is the ‘holotype’ and it must be stored in a scientific collection such as Museums Victoria, so it is available for researchers in the future. Understanding the diversity of living animals in the world relies on hard-won knowledge based on scientific collections and publications.

Victoria has a rich diversity of animal species and many of them are endemic, meaning they are only found in Victoria. And we still haven’t identified all of the animals that live here. It is estimated that around the world there are millions and millions of species, particularly of insects, spiders, crustaceans and molluscs, yet to be scientifically described. It is difficult to know if animal species are declining or increasing if you don’t exactly know what is out there. So the science of finding and describing new biological species is a crucial part of understanding what is happening to animal species as the climate changes.

Pictured here is a holotype specimen of a jewel beetle Stigmodera (Castiarina) gordonburnsi discovered in the Grampians in 1982 by Gordon Burns. In this instance, the species was named after the collector.

Curation notes by: Lucinda Horrocks and Museums Victoria.

FROGS & BUSHFIRES

In the forests of Victoria, bushfires have been an inevitable aspect of our hot dry summers for along time.

Some native species have adapted to cycles of bushfire but with climate change we expect to see hotter fires burning more often.

How will native animals cope with the trauma of more frequent and more extreme fire events?

In February 2009 the small township of Kinglake was engulfed by the most devastating fire in terms of loss of life in Australia’s recent history. Sadly, 119 people died, 1242 homes were destroyed and 125,383 hectares burned in the East Kilmore (Kinglake) fire, a large part of the ferocious Victorian Black Saturday fires which claimed a tragic 173 lives in total.

The Kinglake fire was also catastrophic for wildlife including a population of tree frogs Museums Victoria researchers Jane Melville, Katie Date and Dominique Potvin had been studying for two years.

After the fire the question for the researchers became: what was the effect of this bush fire on the frog populations? Could there be any frogs left in the area? And would they start repopulating?

Pictured here is the brown tree frog (Litoria ewingii), a very common species in the Kinglake area before the Black Saturday bushfire hit.

Four months after the Black Saturday fires the researchers went back to their now burnt study sites to see how many frogs had survived.

By listening to the calls of breeding male frogs ‘advertising’ for mates, they counted a number of frogs. This seemed good news: frogs had survived the bushfires and were breeding!

However, back at the Museums Victoria DNA lab, the genetic data told a different story. Genetic fingerprint analysis showed effective frog populations were significantly reduced and much more inbred after the fires, suggesting only a few adult frogs had survived to reproduce. The loss of genetic diversity meant the population was vulnerable to new threats such as disease or environmental change or the next fire.

Over a five year period after Black Saturday the researchers found the populations remained inbred and smaller in number, suggesting something in the post fire landscape had cut the Kinglake frogs off from essential connections to other frog populations that may have helped renewal.

The effective population size of the locally-abundant brown tree frog (pictured here) decreased by 98% immediately following the fire in 2009 and had still not entirely recovered by the end of the five year study.

The researchers predict that many species of Victorian forest frogs, both abundant and rare, are at risk of extinction from increased bushfires due to climate change.

This is sad news for frogs which are in trouble globally, with up to 40% of species facing imminent extinction. In Victoria 50% of Victoria’s 30 frog species are listed as threatened.

An important part of frog population survival seems to be maintaining connectivity between dispersed populations after bushfires - which is perhaps a way humans can intervene through forest and conservation management.

Pictured here is the growling grass frog (Litoria raniformis) which was once abundant in Victoria but is now an endangered species because of loss of habitat and other human impacts. The researchers found that the growling grass frog is at higher risk of extinction after bushfire than all the frog populations they studied.

This research into frogs, their genetic diversity and the changes in their abundance over time, was underpinned by information held at the Herpetology Collection at Museums Victoria.

Frogs are amphibians and so they fall into the branch of zoology called ‘herpetology’ which deals with reptiles and amphibians. The Museums Victoria Herpetology Collection is one of the oldest collections of its kind in Australia. It contains over 78,000 specimens of snakes, lizards, frogs, salamanders, crocodilians and turtles.

The collection contains a comprehensive representation of amphibians and reptiles from south-eastern Australia, as well as material from elsewhere in Australia and overseas. It is the legislated repository for Victorian reptile and amphibian specimens and as such it provides information on the composition and distribution of Victorian reptiles and amphibians over the past 150 years. It contains specimens from extinct and endangered populations. Recent efforts have focussed on developing an increasingly important tissue collection for molecular research.

The majority of the Herpetology Collection comprises specimens kept in 70% ethanol, but there is also a dry and skeletal collection, mounted specimens, some cleared and stained specimens, a slide collection of blood smears, a collection of cryogenically stored tissue material and a collection of silicon rubber moulds taken from registered specimens for producing long lasting exhibition casts.

The collection is supported by an X-ray and photographic collection, a sound library of frog calls and also a herpetological library, comprising both recent and historical publications. Additionally, a collection of 3D CT scans of skeletal features is being developed.

The collection includes over 950 ‘type’ specimens which are important scientific references – a type specimen is the individual specimen from which a definition of a species is based. The Type Collection has been acquired over the entire life of the Museum and provides the ultimate reference for a significant number of Australian species.

Pictured here is a specimen kept in spirit (ethanol) of the Victorian Frog Litoria paraewingi. This is a holotype, meaning it is the single specimen after which the species has been defined and named.

Curation notes by: Jane Melville, Senior Curator of Herpetology Museums Victoria, Katie Date, Collections Manager Museums Victoria, Dominique Potvin, University of the Sunshine Coast and Lucinda Horrocks, Wind & Sky Productions.

BROAD-TOOTHED RATS

How do you study whether climate change is impacting native Australian animals like the Broad-toothed rat?

A group of Museums Victoria researchers, including Master’s student Stella Shipway and Senior Curator of Mammals Kevin Rowe, wanted to see what the effects of warming temperature and reduced rainfall have had on this little mammal. So they went back to locations where the Broad-toothed rat had last been found and compared their distribution today with what it had been previously.

The last significant scientific surveys of the distribution and habitat of the native rodent Mastacomys fuscus, the Broad-toothed rat, in Victoria took place in the 1970s and 1980s, with some information going back to the 1930s. The survey results and the specimens underpinning it are part of the scientific Mammalogy Collection at Museums Victoria.

Scientific collections held in museums and other collecting institutions provide an important time capsule of information which help researchers understand changes over time.

This is useful for climate change research projects as scientists can go to data both in the recent and distant past where climatic conditions are known and compare the results then to the results today.

The data and scientific information researchers collect now and gather into museums and scientific collections is also stored so it too can be used to inform future research.

Curation notes by: Stella Shipway, Field Ecologist & Masters of Zoology Graduate, Dr Kevin Rowe, Senior Curator of Mammals Museums Victoria and Lucinda Horrocks, Wind & Sky Productions.

The researchers revisited areas around Victoria where the Broad-toothed rat had been documented as living previously.

The Broad-toothed rat lives mainly where the temperature is cool, rainfall is high, the ground is damp but not swampy, and there is a lot of the type of grass it likes to eat nearby. It is most commonly found in alpine heathlands and grasslands in the open areas between the snow line and thicker shrubs.

It lives in places like the Otway Ranges, Wilson’s Promontory, the Yarra Ranges, the Dandenong Ranges, the Alpine Ranges and far East Gippsland.

The rats feed only on particular types of sedges and grasses that grow in this kind of location and climate. They also create nests in the grasses and construct special tunnel runways in the grass to run between their nests. The runways are made of trampled grass and chewed up grass clippings.

The Broad-toothed rat used to be found all around Victoria but has declined in range and distribution since European settlement.

Curation notes by: Stella Shipway, Field Ecologist & Masters of Zoology Graduate, Dr Kevin Rowe, Senior Curator of Mammals Museums Victoria and Lucinda Horrocks, Wind & Sky Productions.

Whether or not the Broad-toothed rat still lives in an area was determined by looking in the grasses for scats, or rat poo.

The poo is green and wet when fresh, and gradually lightens and dries with age.

The picture above shows three age classes of Mastacomys fuscus scats showing their distinguishing characteristics: a) fresh – identified from a dark green or brown colour, fresh, wet and fibrous; b) older – identified as having a darker green colour but still wet; and c) old – identified as straw coloured and dry with small fragments of undigested grass cuticle and fibre.

Curation notes by: Stella Shipway, Field Ecologist & Masters of Zoology Graduate.

Researcher Stella Shipway found that the Broad-toothed rat had disappeared from over half (almost 53%) of the historical sites that she resurveyed over Victoria.

This relief map of Victoria shows 68 historical (1934-1989) Broad-toothed rat sites resurveyed in this study. The rat persisted at 32 of the sites (black circles) and was not detected in the other 36 sites (white circles).

This is a drastic decline in occupied sites at which this species was found prior to 1990.

The research results suggested that climate may indeed be a factor in the Broad-toothed rat’s decline. The rat was more likely to persist in high elevation areas which were cooler and had higher average rainfall, and it was more likely to have disappeared from low elevation areas which were warmer and drier today.

However the study could not rule out non-climatic threats also influencing the rat’s survival such as red foxes and feral cats, inappropriate fire regimes, habitat loss, fragmentation and change due to agriculture and other human impacts, invasive weeds, competition with other native rodents and logging.

Curation notes by: Stella Shipway, Field Ecologist & Masters of Zoology Graduate, Dr Kevin Rowe, Senior Curator of Mammals Museums Victoria and Lucinda Horrocks, Wind & Sky Productions.

This study and the data attached will form part of the Museums Victoria collections and will become a resource for other research into the range and survival of this unique native creature.

The BioBank is a new initiative of Museums Victoria which allows tissue samples and biological samples from animals to be stored at extremely low temperatures, which preserves them for future research.

The scat samples, i.e. the rat poo, will provide a lasting record of the presence of Broad-toothed rats at the sites where they were recorded and preserve information about the rat’s diet, genetics and pathogens, among other things. But the BioBank doesn’t just store poo. It can also store reproductive tissues such as embryos, eggs and sperm which will facilitate research into reproductive biology, particularly in threatened species.

Curation notes by: Stella Shipway, Field Ecologist & Masters of Zoology Graduate, Dr Kevin Rowe, Senior Curator of Mammals Museums Victoria and Lucinda Horrocks, Wind & Sky Productions.

The BioBank is a new initiative of Museums Victoria.

It allows tissue samples and biological samples from animals to be stored at extremely low temperatures, which preserves them for future research.

The scat samples, ie the rat poo, will provide a lasting record of the presence of Broad-toothed rats at the sites where they were recorded and preserve information about the rat’s diet, genetics and pathogens, among other things. But the BioBank doesn’t just store poo. It can also store reproductive tissues such as embryos, eggs and sperm which will facilitate research into reproductive biology, particularly in threatened species.

Curation notes by: Stella Shipway, Field Ecologist & Masters of Zoology Graduate, Dr Kevin Rowe, Senior Curator of Mammals Museums Victoria and Lucinda Horrocks, Wind & Sky Productions.

PORT PHILLIP BAY: UNDERWATER BACKYARD

This underwater footage provides an immersive experience of Port Phillip Bay in Victoria, Melbourne’s ‘underwater backyard.’

Filmed by Dr Julian Finn, Senior Curator of Marine Invertebrates at Museums Victoria, the underwater footage is not only a record of the state of Port Phillip Bay in 2014 when the footage was collected but is a beautiful watching experience for museum visitors and curious viewers. The film was originally projected in a dome so that viewers were surrounded by the sensation of a marine environment.

Port Phillip Bay in Victoria is home to a diversity of exquisite marine life including fish, corals, birds, crustaceans, plants, algae and mammals. It is also home to a busy commercial shipping port and abuts Melbourne, Victoria’s populous capital city.

Population growth, climate change, marine pests, fishing and shipping all threaten life in the bay. Litter from rubbish and fishing waste is harmful to fur seals. As climate change brings more extreme floods and droughts excess nutrients, sediments and pollution may flood into the bay, putting water quality and species health at risk. Warming waters due to climate change may affect spawning of species such as King George Whiting. And sea level rises will bring changes to water quality and habitats.

Species are on the move, including the western blue groper, a big fish that lives to aged 70 and changes sex from female to male when it turns about 30, that is taking residence in Port Phillip Bay due to warmer waters.

Curation notes by: Lucinda Horrocks, Wind & Sky Productions.