The Bohart Museum of Entomology at the University of California, Davis, is helping to spread the biodiversity of insects.
Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum and a distinguished professor of entomology, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, recently received a request for duplicate specimens of beetles, moths and butterflies for a Biodiversity Science Museum and Research Center to be headquartered at the research institution, Atatürk University, in Erzurum, Turkey.
“We're gifting them 350 large-bodied beetles, moths and butterflies for their display,” Professor Kimsey said. “The specimens are all duplicates of material we collected in Papua New Guinea about a decade ago.”
Levent Gültekin, a professor at Atatürk University, recently emailed Kimsey that he and his colleagues are working to create "a Biodiversity Science Museum and Research Center belonging to Atatürk University. Our concept will be actually a natural history museum. This is rather a new topic here, and it will be the first museum in Eastern Turkey if we can succeed. As a first step, we are working on a permanent exhibition in four settings: Arthropoda (majority insect) diversity, Plant diversity, Vertebrate and Paleodiversity.”
“For insect (and other arthropods), we are planning to hang 100 exhibition boxes (30x40 cm in size) to show great diversity for this group,” Professor Gültekin related, adding that “Our insect collection almost 100 percent comes from Turkey; but we would like to allocate one fourth of boxes for other zoogeographical realms except for Palearctic.”
The Bohart Museum is glad to oblige, Kimsey said.
Atatürk University is a land-grant university established in 1957 in Erzurum, located in the Eastern Anatolia Region. The university consists of 23 faculties, 18 colleges, 8 institutes and 30 research centers.W ikipedia says Atatürk "serves as "a hub of educational and cultural excellence for the Eastern Region." Some 6 million people populate the region.
The Bohart Museum, now celebrating the 75th anniversary of its founding (by UC Davis entomology professor Richard M. Bohart (1913-2007), is home to nearly 8 million insect specimens, collected from around the world. It also houses an insect-themed gift shop, now online; and a live “petting zoo,” comprised of Madagascar hissing cockroaches, stick insects and tarantulas.
Located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane, the Bohart Museum is currently closed to the public due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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