When you no longer want your accumulated nature stuff

Nature Talk
1

It has been said, “There are two kinds of possessions: useful possessions and beautiful possessions. Useful possessions should be placed where we can use them, and beautiful possessions should be placed where we can enjoy their beauty.”

Where does that leave possessions in old trunks and storage bins at the back of closets?

I’m in a decluttering phase right now. Not the first time. And I find myself up against the thoughts and feelings I first alluded to in this thread:
“Ecofacts” and growing out of acquisitiveness

I look at the items pulled out of trunks, boxes, and bins, and I am reminded of several things that others have mentioned.

“Well lebeled, well cared for specimens”? Well, my herbarium is well-documented; I have the labels printed out, with collector’s name (me), collection number, detailed location data, and (putative) determination. But proper herbarium paper was always pushed aside by more pressing expenses and they are still sandwiched between pages of an old Yellow Pages. And in the past, I tried donating them to my alma mater, but was told that they had no use for them. (They did take my stuffed mammal skins for their teaching collection.)

As to the dead cicadas (found dead), I could go back through my field journals and find the dates and locations for at least some of them. But again, with one thing and another going on in my life, I never got around to the pinning and mounting. They are still in a plastic case waiting for me to do something with them.

More problematic are the specimens in ethanol, collected for a study but since deteriorated beyond any further usefulness. The waste ethanol is HAZMAT; I can’t just pour it down the sink.

Oh, yes – the shed deer antlers. I suppose I could post them on eBay. This seems to be legal, although different states have different laws about that, and I don’t have documentation for them. But at this point, that just feels like “passing the buck” (pun intended); they would just become someone else’s clutter.

I don’t even want to think about the shells.

Now, the cicadas and herbarium material, I could easily just toss out into the bush. In weeks or at most a few months it would all cycle back into nature’s nutrient cycles and be of no further concern. That wouldn’t work so well with the antlers or especially the shells, which would hang around a lot longer. And that ethanol is a real problem.

So for @AdamWargon , or others here who used to have collections and no longer do, what did you do with them? And would you do something different if you had a do-over?

3 Likes
2

The details of my life are quite inconsequential . . .

https://youtu.be/jMIDpJ8H7H0?si=FWl_0jNyXg-6cHmw

1 Like
3

I have a huge natural history collection that I’ve accumulated over the last 15 years or so, with tens of thousands of individual lots/items: seashells, feathers, crustacean moults, bones/skeletons, dried fishes, molluscs and fishes in alcohol, pinned insects and more. In the last few months, I actually decided to get rid of almost all of it, for three main reasons:

  1. I’ve already photographed pretty much every single specimen and uploaded them to iNat (for the few I am yet to, I will do so soon)

  2. I don’t have the time or expertise to properly curate and maintain many of the specimens, and I have noticed some are starting to decay, become discoloured, etc. In particular I had a large collection of fishes in ethanol for which the alcohol was starting to become pretty manky.

  3. Much of my collection (except for my seashells, which are in a display cabinet) has just been sitting in boxes or drawers in my house or garage, not being used for anything, when it could be getting put to much better use.

So what have I done with them/plan to do with them?

I recently gave all of my fishes in alcohol to the Australian Museum. I know a lot of the fishes staff there quite well, all of my specimens had detailed metadata like date and location, and most of the specimens were rare or interesting records. So they were happy to incorporate them into the collection.

I’ve collected hundreds of herbarium specimens, but I already give these to the NSW Herbarium as I collect them.

As for the rest, I have two main plans:

  1. Give anything of scientific value or interest to institutions in Australia where they’re happy to accept them

  2. For everything else, give the specimens to either my university where I’m doing my PhD/I teach, as many of the natural history specimens used in undergraduate courses are quite old and could do with replacing/updating, or, to local environmental education centres so they can be used for school groups and the like.

I no longer see any point (in most cases) for me to just have these specimens lying around my house when they could be getting put to better use, and the records are all on iNat anyway.

8 Likes
4

Photograph them then throw them back in the sea?

4 Likes
5

If I remember correctly, antlers are often chewed on by rodents for the antlers’ mineral content. So, leaving them in the wild somewhere could be beneficial. As for shells, I just tossed four in my brush pile. I figure the minerals in them will eventually erode back into the soil and possibly be used by fungi, tree roots, and various inverts. (Or just confuse archaeologists in the future.)

For the past 18 months, I’ve been collecting bryophytes because I want to learn them and many species need microscopic examination for identification to the species level. I figured that since I was collecting anyway, I might as well curate them properly and donate them to an appropriate herbarium. So I’ve been in touch with the New England Botanical Club herbarium people pretty much from the beginning and will take them 500+ specimens later this winter. Mostly common species, as far as I know, but documentation is documentation, and I have landowner permission for the 200+ sites I’m collecting on, and those landowners will get annual reports on what I find.

I am right there with you on moths - I pinned specimens for the first month or two I was trapping, but then thought, “Why am I killing these insects? I don’t want a collection. I don’t need specimens except maybe for state-listed species (and good photos have been fine for that purpose)”, so I stopped using a killing agent, stopped spreading and pinning specimens, and have just uploaded my photos to iNat. I fully support the taking of specimens by serious entomologists, whether professional or amateur, but I’m not serious about moths.

But it took me decades to be able to look ahead to the consequences of my current actions and think ahead to what happens to my Stuff when I no longer want it.

6 Likes
6

So this is why us bivalve identifiers have been finding observations of shells washed up on beaches where they don’t belong? It doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things but still :)

3 Likes
7

In the herping world, it is common for herpers to prank each other with painted ropes lying in a rock cut, etc.

I don’t remember the thread or the user, but at least one person, and maybe several people, talked about discarding shells where they don’t belong, just to playfully mess with other iNatters.

So that is another thing you can do with a nature collection: use it to create unusual records for other iNatters!

8

But not in the spirit of iNat’s, first be kind.

@jasonhernandez74 I would concentrate on a good solution for the HAZMAT - as the next person will likely discard it wherever without a second thought. The shells (and rocks here) I would leave in a garden - where they are expected to be ‘Location inaccurate’

9

Distill that thing, sell it on eBay as ‘The Naturalist’s Rotgut Vintage’ or whatever.

1 Like
10

@jasonhernandez74 I think you mentioned moving from the DR to North Carolina recently, no? Is this useful for the ethanol? (It is just a starting place but there is a phone number at the bottom.)

edit to add: here is a by county list

2 Likes
11

I’d be inclined to throw them somewhere they’re likely to get broken up before washing up and be found (e.g. into deeper water off a rocky or gravelly shore). I think you’d need to be really lucky to refind a discarded shell, but it might happen if it was large, distinctive and discarded on a sandy beach that lots of observers go to.

12

it happens more often than you think. Here are two I found at the same beach two years apart:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/28596507
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/35222758

4 Likes
13

I wonder what you would mark it as if one of these discarded shells were repurposed by a hermit crab… captive shell wild crab?

14

Interesting discussion on both of those observations, thanks! So, my advice may not be the best. I had been thinking of returning the minerals back to the ecosystem where they belonged. So, best to smash the shells up first? (that would be a bit sad to have to do). And be careful not to discard shells outside their normal range? Or drop them in the sea a good distance offshore, if you have the chance.

1 Like
15

for shells that I’ve returned in the past, I’ve always done so at the beach I originally collected them from, although of course I acknowledge this is often not possible, especially in the context of this thread where specimens have been collected over years across many different locations. Maybe someone could etch a short message into each one explaining its story for when its found in an odd location…

3 Likes
16

Donate your labeled plants in the newspapers where they’re stored! That’s what we botanists all do. The herbarium will mount them on good paper if they want to keep them. If they don’t, they’ll exchange or gift specimens to other herbaria. As with iNaturalist observations, what scientists want are specimens with dates and locations reported.

If you message me with your location, I can look up a herbarium in the area and contact personnel there about this potential donation. By the way, labeled herbarium specimens in newspaper can be a tax deduction in the U.S., if that’s of interest to you.

17

Critter with litter hermit crab homes
In 2 projects

1 Like
18

Put the shells in big, cheap glass jars or plastic bags, and give them to a thrift shop? Someone might like them for “home decor” or to use in crafts.