The San Diego Natural History Museum, or The Nat, recently hired a new curator of invertebrate zoology, Dr. Shahan Derkarabetian. Since his job includes the study of insects, arachnids and crustaceans, I had to meet him.
The department used to simply be called the Department of Entomology, but now it bears the more inclusive and far-reaching title of Invertebrate Zoology.
"Invertebrates cover every animal without a backbone that is more than a single cell, so it's a lot of things. It's 90% of life on this planet, probably," Derkarabetian said. "So that includes things like insects, arachnids, worms, corals, crabs, shrimp, all the crustaceans, everything you can imagine that is all the little weirdos, basically. So yeah, it's a huge amount of diversity that falls under invertebrate zoology."
His job is to direct the research of the invertebrate zoology department.
"I guide where we're going to collect, what we're collecting, what projects we're taking on, but also to figure out what's important and what we should be doing," Derkarabetian explained. "And in the case of bioservices, what we need to do to help conserve the region or species."
Derkarabetian oversees millions of specimens spanning 150 years, which are kept in multiple collection spaces across the museum. His particular expertise is in arachnids.
"I've been working on arachnids, specifically a group called the opiliones, for about 20 years," Derkarabetian said. "Since I started working here, arachnid research has become important. One of the projects I started was to go after the arachnids of Southern California, especially in the mountaintops, and really kind of build our collection and let people know that we have arachnids here."
Because not all of them have been identified.
"There's an estimate out there that of all species that exist on the planet, only about 20% of them have actually been described and studied," Derkarabetian said. "So we're at 80% unknown diversity. A good proportion of that diversity could already exist in collections."
But no one has yet had time to go through every specimen to identify and sometimes name. But the museum received a grant to help bring some collections up to modern standards, which means digitizing each specimen with all its information and making it freely available to the public or other researchers.
The museum has a volunteer who comes in once a week to help digitize, and that means going jar by jar, vial by vial, taking everything out, checking all the labels, and then taking a picture. And then virtual volunteers working from home transcribe that information and get it into a database.
"My mom is a virtual volunteer, so she's long retired, and that's what keeps her busy now," Derkarabetian said.
Derkarabetian points to a sacred cabinet tightly locked up and bearing holotypes, or the name-bearing specimens for an entire species.
"So that single specimen holds that name. So any scientist that wants to know what that species looks like, they go back to that holotype," Derkarabetian said. "So we have our type specimens here, and this is perhaps the most important case in our entire collection because holotypes are irreplaceable if something happens. So if there was a reason to evacuate this building and this room, I would carry this case on my back down the stairs."
It is clear how much Derkarabetian loves his job and takes its responsibilities seriously. More than once, he described going through the collections as being like Christmas and opening presents.
One of the gifts the museum houses that brings him great pride and joy is in the holotype cabinet. It is a lacewing specimen that is not a holotype but is special for a very different reason.
"So this is a specimen collected by Charles Darwin on the voyage of the Beagle, 1836," Derkarabetian said. "It is the only Charles Darwin specimen in this museum, and it is well protected with the most important specimens in this invertebrate zoology collection."
But Derkarabetian treats every one of the millions of specimens under his curatorship with care because even the tiniest of creatures could reveal something amazing about our world.
"Again, it's Christmas," Derkarabetian said.
You can find examples of The Nat's invertebrate zoology collection in its Living Lab, Amazement in the Basement and permanent collections. So go explore. Maybe you will find something incredible like I did. I mentioned how the Goliath beetle changed the course of my life, and Derkarabetian just happen to have one — just a baby — right there in the lab!
