Welcome to Creature feature production of iHeartRadio. I'm your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology and evolutionary biology, and today on the show, we are talking about the weirdest, most interesting stories that happen behind the scenes at museums. Natural history museums are an incredible resource to be able to go and visit and see some of the most amazing aspects of evolutionary biology, often brought right to your city. But there's so much that goes on that you may
not even know about. So today I am being joined by the assistant director of the Museum of Zoology at Cambridge University and the author of the new book Nature's Memory, Behind the Scenes of the world's natural history Museum, Jack Ashby.
Welcome, Hi, Kenchin, Thanks for having me.
I'm so excited because I remember when I was a student, I had an opportunity to visit There's the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and it was really an amazing museum to go to, Like you could go see there's this seal, a camp that was suspended in this murky fluid. It was it was all very old and kind of creepy, but really cool. And then I had the opportunity to actually see in the archives, so stuff that was not available to the public, and there was so much more stuff.
I had no idea that the museum was not just this kind of front facing thing for visitors to see and look at the interesting taxidermy and bones and specimens, but that there's like an incredible collection. Usually that the museum is has behind the scenes that they can't display everything, but they have so many weird, weird things exactly.
I've be in that museum in Harvard is amazing. Ar could be the best plant display in the world.
Yeah, yeah, the glass wow, is amazing.
It is amazing. But yeah, like behind the behind the scenes that natiste. But honestly, I don't think there are more interesting places than whether you're in a room with literally millions of incredible.
Yeah, the weirdest collection of parts of animals, Like I remember there was a an entire collection of I believe it was moth and butterfly Genitalia, which was started by Nabokov because you know, he was a weird guy. He was also a lepidopterist and the author of Flowlitas, so interesting man. But like, yeah, just there they would have all these things that they couldn't display all of them, and then also it was a collection that would be
uh was continuing. I remember seeing someone who was in the process of stuffing this little bird, so a collected specimen of this type of bird, and it's like, oh, here they are, you know, just stuff in the bird full of sawdust. Like it was kind of to see that this museum it's not just sort of a dusty old building full of stuff that just sits there and
nothing happens, like there's so much activity. So can you tell everyone kind of about your role at the museum of the University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge.
Sure, So I'm really lucky. My job is essentially working with the people who look after two million in speciments here and also the people look after what about visitors, So I've got a really diverse role across our museum. It's incredible. We have to say about two million specimens here, so they cover the whole of the animal kingdom, all of biological time over the last half a billion years or so, from all across the world. So it's yeah, it's pretty exciting place to be. And also as part
of the University of Cambridge. There's really interesting research going on behind the scenes in the museum, and like you say, it's really important that the museums tell the story then that it's not just the galleries, it's also research communities, but also genuinely enormous store rooms of just loads of stuff that has changed the world and how we understand it, and it's used every day in groundbreaking research.
I remember when I went to the back rooms of the Harvard Natural History Museum, there would be like a room that looked sort of maybe like a normal archive, just a bunch of drawers, a bunch of cabinets, and then open a drawer and then there'd just be a bunch of sort of either stuffed birds or taxi dermaine animal samples, or even just parts of an animal, like maybe maybe a pelt, like a bunch. They might open a drawer and just you see a bunch of little mice pelts, as if it's like for these are the
rugs for some kind of like leprechaun or something. Just this the but it was for, you know, and then they would explain that it'd be for some research on the change and color of these these mouse pelts. Over seasonal changes for these field mice or something. There'd be all this amazing research. So take us sort of behind the scenes at the Museum of Zoology at Cambridge University. What does it look like in what is what is kind of happening there a lot?
It's like the first thing to say is and it's probably obvious as soon as we start thinking about it, but it doesn't seem to surprise people. Is that, you know, a tiny, tiny fraction of what we have in our collections is on display. So we have too many in speciments here in Cambridge. You wouldn't want to see too many specimens at once, so there's only a few thousand specimens in our gallery. So I think it's it's about a quarter of a percent of how collections are on display.
You know, go to the Natural History Museum and in London they have eighty million specimens, so I think it's about three one thousands of a percent of their collection is on display. Wow, statistically almost nothing. You know. Smithsonian Museum in the US is the biggest museum in the world in the natural history collections, one hundred and forty eight million specimens. So just being here about the scale of what we hold like globally the distributed collections over
a billion specimen. It is, you know, it's extraordinary to think of that, and so basically quite a lot of what goes into looking after those specimens. Think about natural history collections, particularly zoology and plants, is that they're all organic, so we have to stop them from rotting, stop them from being eaten by paths or being damaged by a mold,
and so that's a pretty active role. But most people in the museums are here to share them like they are public spaces, both behind the scenes and kind of
the public galleries public galleries where most people visit. But we have a really active set of things going on behind the scenes where either people are working to create program, exhibitions or events to share the collections, but also just to welcome researchers visiting from all over the world or having you know, we have about twenty five PhD students here in the museum's order in Cambridgry of six curators who are researching the collection, so we're doing research both
in house. Also hundreds of thiss come to use the collections in their research.
Yeah, and so like, what's an example of how a researcher might use something a collection from a museum because I think you know, often when you think of say biology, research is something like maybe you go out and do an observational study in the wild and you watch an animal's behavior, or maybe you do some kind of research on a live animal, Like you you do some sort of mouse study, right like in medicine, where you have
you have mice in a lab. So I think often the idea of research is like you either do something in a lab with sort of like live things that you've cut, or you go out into the wild and you sit for a really long time and hope you see something. But what in what way does museums can museum specimens be used in research?
It's a lot of ways, you know, and their use has only ever grown over time. So since the very earliest days of that for history museums, the main kind of science that was done in them is still done in them is taxonomy, so describing the diversity of life
on Earth. If you describe a new species, you have to base it on a single specimen or small set of specimens called type specimens, and those type specimens have to be deposited in the public Museum, so that forever, you know, hundreds of years in the future and hundreds of years in the past. People are saying, okay, if you're describing a new species, you have to compare it
to all of the other known species. To say why your new one is different, you have to compared to the type specimens, and so without you know, without knowing what species exist, not much of biology makes sense as well as all as your bosom. It makes sense even today thinking conservation biology. We can't conserve what we don't know exist. So just describing diversity is fundamental to music inqulotions. But since that so much more is happening here in Cambridge.
Our insect Ecology group are taking the data off of insect specimens that are collected in the eighteen twenties around Cambridge in the East of England and working with the local wildlife trusts for the local conservation bodies to share with them what was here two hundred years ago before our part of the country was drained. So Cambridgeshire is massive wetland. Naturally, the fens in the East of England is this big flat wetland and habitat which was drained
during the industrial revolution. So the Wildlife Trust are now working to restore and those habitats, but they need to know what was there two hundred years ago. So the data and our specimens are absolutely valuable for that. So the kind of the very fundamentally, what have we got? What is the diversity of life? And then each of those data points, each of those specimens tell us where
something lived when it was collected. So it's evidence for how biodiversity has changed over time, so particularly through human interactions, but also through climate change. So our collections in museums are the world's best data set for how the world has changed over the last two hundred years, particularly on those two issues that affect literally everyone on the planet, where biodiversity loss and time changed. We could we could
not understand this that museum collections. But pretty much every week someone is coming up with a new way of using a collection in a way that the people that collected the specimens would have absolutely no idea what they were doing. Specimens collected in eighteen hundreds. People who work on genetics now are using those collections in ways that can't be imagined. But there's so many more kind of
imaginative ways of using it. There's this really famous study where it turned out that the soot the pollution on the feathers of birds in museum collections ended up being the best evidence for the use of black coal in
the US over the last one hundred plus years. So people can track and say, okay, look at the dirt on a bird feather and work out how much pollution was in the atmosphere, and then match that to the climate data from the date that the bird was collected, and track that over thousands of specimens over one hundred years, and you've got the best environmental record for air pollution
in the US. And obviously I didn't even match that the specimen was a bird for that it was they weren't looking at the birdyliness of the specimen, they were
just looking at the dirt on the bed. And there are loads of examples like that, or you know, there's there's a great one the Naturalist Museum did in London and a few years ago where the first thing you see when you walk into the museum is this blue whale that died in the eighteen nineties off the west coast of Ireland, and they took one of the sheets of Baileen from the whales mats, So this is you know, it's the big filter like civil like.
Structure, the push room that they have in their mouths that they used to filter out krill exactly.
So they'll take this massive gulp of water around krill or squirered of fish and then push that water back through these these brushes and hang out of their guns and the same and them they just live around the inside and how the biggest animals in the world eats and the smalllest animals in the world. But what they did was because by lean grows constantly throughout the animal's life like you know, fingernails or head does, it provides a record for the last they think six or seven
years of that animal because it was growing incrementally. So they took a sample like let's say, every centimeter down the bailey and that proved that provided evidence for where exactly the whale was and the bailing group, because of course we are what we eat. Yes, the chemistry of the sea changes depending where on Earth it was, and whales are really hard to study despite the fact that they're massive, like they're super rare live underwater.
We just cat we can't be like you know, when we think about studies and you're sitting there trying to observe what the animals are doing. We can't do that with whales, despite how big they are. It seems like they'd be very obvious to study. But we can't live, at least not yet, like in a bubble lab in the middle of the ocean, waiting around for a blue whale to do something interesting.
Exactly exactly so they could show. In the last six or seven years of her life she kind of the chemistry of her baileying, so the chemical isotopes of her bailey matched that for about a year she was around the subtropics or maybe around Cape Third in the Atlantic, and then she spent each year migrating back and forwards to the North Atlantic and the subtropics every year, and then they could find the hormones in her bailiing to so that she became pregnant and gave birth again in
the in the subtropics before migrating north again and eventually dying and washing up on the on the west coast of the Island're thinking eighteen ninety one and not studying This wouldn't be possible without without takings from the Museum.
That's amazing, I mean, and it ties into so much research, Like there's more modern research now on how whale urine is like one of the biggest contributors to nitrogen in
the in more tropical waters, right. And then there's this sort of funnel, this like p funnel from the from the Arctic colder waters that actually have a lot more nutritional density in them, and then they take the whales feed there, then they migrate to these more tropical, warmer waters and then they'll they'll mate, they'll give birth, and so all the the leavings from them being there, like urine, even the placenta contributes to this nitrogen in these area.
And then having this history of like, well we know that whales we're doing these migratory paths for a long time. It really contributes to our understanding of how they have historically been behaving and how how you know, before kind of humans started to do a bunch of whaling, how much more of this whale fertilizer essentially must have been
in the ocean. So it gives us like a better idea of like how much more nutrient and some of these tropical regions probably were before we started our massive whaling campaign in the in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds.
Yeah, it's such such a cool story that, Yes, Joe Roman has just written this book. I just read an Eat Poop Guy exactly about what you're talking about about this kind of contributions that different animals make. Particularly is a big section on whales to the kind of the chemistry of their environment and the nutrition of their environments. Yeah, really really interesting stuff.
There's an interesting also when you were mentioning the whale bailing. I remember reading about how there were various museums who
would hold on to whale ear plugs. So like ear wax, which in whales isn't softer flake how it can be in humans, but it actually forms these really hard, almost like rock like chunks, and through its lifetime it forms these bands like kind of like tree rings, but this these sort of more horizontal bands as it is changing its seasonal nutrition and it builds up over a lifetime, and museums would get these from dead whales and they
didn't know what to do with them. They didn't certainly like maybe they would put one or two on display, but they had so many of them, but they held onto it right, Like, this is one thing I love about what museums do is they'll just hold on to stuff and you know, without any guarantee that this is going to be really important. But it's like, hey, this is this seems very cool, very interesting, we don't know
what to do with it. And then in you know, more recently, researchers are like, hey, actually we now know how to study the chemical composition of the earwax, and so we can track because like with the different bands of earwax, we know that this whale is this many years old, We know that it changes colors with the season, with the nutritional cycle, and now we can actually, like with the bay leen, we can look at hormone levels. We can know if this whale was like stressed in
this certain season. And so all of this information like basically the whale's life story stored in its giant chunk of earwax that museums have been carefully taking care of tending to with no you know, like with no glory, right, Like it's not like you get an award for hanging
on to old whale earwax. But then finally it becomes really important for research, Like are they do you have any other examples of like very like seemingly either unimportant or really strange or gross museum holdings that could actually be really interesting for research.
Something were called the extended specimen concept, which is a not very inserting way of how exctually get about what is on our specimens. So, like I said, fundamentally, it's what is it, where is it from, and when did it die? Is that's the basic data of any specimen. But beyond that, we can you know, we can take the pollen off of the bee and work out what flowers it is visiting. We can take the stomach contents
of any animal worked out what it was eating. We can take hormones, as you said, or chemical data and work out what was it, you know, what what how is it? How is it experiencing its life, and what what environments is it exposed to, which can tell us exactly where it's came from came from by matching the soil chemistry or water chemistry. And we can take its parasites.
We can take a measure of how symmetrical an animal it is, which tells us how stress it was one of the growing They're so just infinite data on any of these specimens literally infinite data and if you take that across a billion specimens in the world, Yeah, it is genuinely endless. There's another story, a bit like the weal one, but perhaps less gross, and that's the longest living animal ever discovered, with a tiny species of Arctic clam and people realize that by sectioning, they're taking a
slice across this clamshell. It too had growth rings from winter, summer and change. It's like a like a like a treatment and you can take the you could analyze the chemistry of each of those hundreds of bands. This this clam lift I think five hundred and seventeen years or something like that, and each of those bands providing an environmental record for the sea where it lived, so they can for the last night under years create a climate record of that of that little patch of sea, which
is just present from one specimen. And yeah, well bailey whal ear whap is even cooler and bail because it's the whole the whole of the animal's like pretty long too. Yeah.
They don't they don't like lose. That's it's so strange because they don't like drop. Like as humans, we kind of lose our ear wax right, like it naturally sort of like our the cycle of the ear, like it gets pushed out with like the skin renewal inside the ear and then slowly and it comes out. And that's why you have gross earwax that comes out of your ears.
It's normal and it's healthy. But for whales, it just sits in there and kind of gets and collects over time and it forms these hard plugs and they actually like use them to enhance their their hearing because like sound can travel through the ear plug into their skull
and it's it's wild to me. That's something that it's like, uh, this thing that in human beings were just like, well, this is a gross waste product, and then it just becomes this fundamental part of a whale's anatomy throughout its life. But that's amazing about the I had no idea that there were clams that uh not only would could live that long, but then by looking at this, like it's such a humble little thing, right, like you don't a clam is something I feel like we barely register when
when we're going along the beach. They're so common we eat them. But then too, it's like that just this humble little animal keeping such a detailed record of not
only its life but the environment around it. Like there's so much understanding how much information is contained in like one animal, Like there's the genome, right, the DNA, which is vast and kind of an insanely insane amount of data, but then everything else as well, when you're able to study the chemical composition of say like it's shell or any anything else that you can preserve, is it is
kind of mind blowing. Like you think of a library, right with like billions of books, and then each book is like hundreds of thousands of pages or or even more like when you're thinking about an animal, right, So it is it is just a bewildering amount of information that is collected in museums.
Likely connection hey vers is coming along. It's something coming on with a really specific question, and we're just kind of waiting here for question, and we we can't anticipate what's there with asking me about dental calculus. So plaque on mammal specimen, mambal teeth in a collection like again, it's the kind of always prot back to your growth. Is that going to provide a record of the diet?
Yeah? Also yeah, it's like, hey, you know what, we do have a bunch of plaque in our collection that you can come look at. Yeah, it's that's incredible. And only I think a fraction of these stories sort of reach the news, and usually it's something really sensational or fun to look at. Like how in a lot of music collections they started realizing that there were animal pelts from particularly from Australian marsupials, that would biofluoresse under UV light.
And then they started going like, wait, you know, but we have to test this now on every animal we possibly can't to see which of these which of these mammals are biofluorescing, because I think we had already known that, like there is a lot of biofluorescence, say in scorpions, various arthropods, but then to find that there were a
lot of mammals that also had this biofluorescence. And then of course how do you get access to being able to test a bunch of animal pelts, Well, museums have them, so like just going through these collections and then you know, turning on a little black light and seeing which glows. It's it's it's sort of fun to look at images of these like glowing platyplus pelts. But there's there's so
much more that is happening all the time. I would imagine in terms of researchers suddenly being like, wait, actually, we have so many examples that we could go through and see if this new thing that we're discovering holds true for other species or other specimens exactly.
Yeah, museums are really unusual places and that they bring together animals that you will never find together anywhere else. A worus and a platypust that have steered each other. Yeah,
so my platypusts are actually my corner of zoology. So that was super interesting finding when we found out they're biofluoresce, and we have no idea why or even if there is a reason, you know, it could just be some random revolutionary spandrol wiggle them just it just is it's a byproduct or something else that doesn't have any evolutionary function because sistem most of the time daytime in their burrows, so they probably don't experience a love, if you like,
so we don't really know what's going on there.
Just so fun could just be a fun Easter egg, right, like it's a yeah, Like I know that they've been trying by kind of examining a bunch of specimens, there's been some attempt to establish some pattern of like when does this happen, why does it happen? But yet absolutely sometimes it can just be sort of a structural feature that has nothing like the biofluorescence, has nothing to do
with why that feature is there. Like you said, the spandrel being that you have some structural feature of an animal for some other purpose, and then as kind of like a byproduct, you have this other thing because it refers to I believe, like when you would have like an archway in architecture, and then you have these two corners and the archways that are just there because of
the structure. They don't actually serve any purpose. But in architectural history you'd have all these sort of like highly decorated spandrels just because it's like some space where you can do a little motif. And then in modern times and we're like trying to figure out, like what is the purpose of this spandrel, like what is it there for? And it turns out it's not there for anything. It's just there because it's a byproduct of how you build, uh, sort of a curve within a square archway and then
that's it. So it's the same thing with animals, where it's like yeah, sometimes it's not. It's not there for any reason. Maybe there's a different reason that their fur has this biofluorescent property. Maybe it has something to do with like thermal regulation, but there's no actual purpose to the glowing, but it's it's fun to.
See, yeah, exactly, exactly.
Uh So I one thing that I think is really interesting is that the idea that museums are not like, uh,
there's no such thing as say, a purely objective museum. Uh. And and this is not like a criticism of museum, it's it's it's the idea that a museum can have a viewpoints, so in the same way that a curator of an art museum might make decisions on which paintings or sculptures to highlight, which informs our understanding of art, you know, Like we know that the Mona Lisa is a big deal because when you go to the Louver, there's a giant room mostly just dedicated to her in
a huge line, And so we have this cultural understanding of like she is a big deal, even though her painting's kind of small, And so the duration of a natural history museum, even though it's not art right Like so, I think we're more used to the concept of art being subjective, but with something like a natural history museum, I think there's often this idea like, well, science has sort of one answer, and everyone knows what it is if you do the research, and so that's just how
these decisions are made, say in a museum. But that's not necessarily the case. So what are some examples of how natural history museum curation can either bias our views or change our views on the natural world in ways that are not always bad, but it can definitely interact with sort of our cultural biases that we already have.
I think that's such an interesting question. It's something I spent a lot of time writing about in memory. It's just to think that visually, museums might be showing natural objects, but they are made by people. Both the objects that are not wholly natural they will be artifacted in some way, but the people that have prepared them and then they've
chosen what to put on display. So it's I think it's an astonishing thing that although we might have a billion speciment in the world's naturalist museums, all of the museums, you know, despite that diversity of stuff, pretty much all show the same thing and they talk about the same animals in the same kinds of ways, and that kind of There are these just tropes and trends of how museums talk about nature and how museums display nature that I think are worth on picking it a little bit.
And yeah, the first thing to say is that today most naturalism museums will say that their purpose, like their mission statements, will also something like we want to make our visitors encourage them to care about the natural world, encourage them to care about biodiversity. And I think, you know, they're really good at doing that. But what's interesting is when you go in to a natural history gallery, that's not what biodiversity looks like, you know, just in the
animal I mean first amazonologists. So I'm affected by lets less than other people. But museums are really bad at play displaying plants. Normally, ants are only on displayed in relation to.
Animals and kind of like a background background the carpet on which they say yes exactly.
So this notion of plant line. This where we can look at a scene where you know, there's as a photograph with a leopard in the middle of a grass, and we ignore the grass. We just see the leopard, even though you know what grass is ninety eight percent of the picture. That happens in museums too. But even among animals. You know, we've so far as we have just described about one and a half million species of animal.
And I always ask people to guess how many of those one and a half million species are mammals, And I think people are generally surprised that they but it's not that many. There's only about six and a half thousand, a few in seven thousand, zero point four percent of all life on Earth as a mammal. But what do we see when we go to naturalism museums. We've see mammals, We see loads and loads and loads of mammals, as
insects make up sixty percent of that diversity. So almost a million species of insects has been described, But insects are given so little space in naturalist museums, and I think that's going to affect what people learn to value. So museums are culturally important in our relationship with the natural world, and we obviously we are mammals as humans, and we're going to be drawn to cute things with
cute faces and fur. But if museums really are trying to make people care about their besty, they should probably do a better job of displaying insects.
We've just got to convince people that tartar grades velvet worms are incredibly cute, and we got to.
See that they are.
They're so cute velvet if if I could have like one sort of a genie wish to like make an animal a pet that should not be a pet, like having a giant velvet worm as a pet would be amazing. They're these little pudgy animals. They're not They're just their whole They're kind of their own thing. They're not a worm,
they're not an insect, they're not a caterpillar. They just look like these little soft, chubby pokemon like things that have a bunch of little legs, a bunch of little chubby arms, and then these two fat antenna and they are they they're very cute to look at. They're terrifying predators for smaller insects, but it's a yeah, it's I just I would love to see a museum have on display sort of like giant versions of say, arthropods insects,
so that you can see kind of up close. Because if you're kind of looking at a display with a tiny beetle, maybe someone's like, you know, what is I barely notice that? But if but if you're looking at like a giant plant hopper, and how colorful and amazing it is, I don't know. I would love to see.
Yeah, yeah, they are like obviously infectual, they have going against them. It's that they're tiny, yes, but there are ways of displaying, like there are ways of doing good insect displays, including and you say, giant things, but also just loads and special So what they make up for is what they do insights, they make up for it.
I remember seeing in a natural history museum like this giant mandola of like various beetle species, just like kind of arranged by color, and that was that was very cool.
It's yeah, they're beautiful, and so I think that's that's one bites is that we're not we're not reflecting the natural world taken well. And then there's another one that's slightly more insidious. And that's that we have way more male specimens on display in naturist museums than where do you females?
He wants to see a girl lion? Nobody.
I like that. You might think, you might think that you know it's justified, but and you know, it's a difficult decision. So you know, nature's men. We spend a lot of time talking about it, that people are making decisions about what on displayed, what stories are the most interesting or most like, to help people feel inspired all
struck by the natural world. And yes, you can understand that given the choice between you know, a massive, brightly colored male bird and a kind of brown, small drab female bird, there is there is some sense in them showing the female. I would argue that it's interesting to show that males and females can be different.
And it's also like the manner in which that like the manner in which they're displayed with male and female birds. Is One thing I've noticed is that the big maybe you have like a brightly colored male, and then they include the female, but she's kind of in the background.
She's They don't really spend a lot of time preparing the taxidermad specimen she's just like and there's the female and she's brown and whatever and like and they have the male in this like glorious sort of you know action, pose wings out, you know, in a in some display, and it really makes you feel like the female birds are sort of just in the background, not doing anything, when in fact, these drab female birds are the whole reason in a lot of theories is that they're the whole
reason you have these like male displays, and they have so much agency in picking mates and what they're doing in terms of, uh, care for offspring, or they may have some really interesting behavior and you're just not capturing that. If you have this big, you know, display of a truly beautiful male specimen, nothing wrong with doing that, but then the females just kind of like in the background.
Like if you could maybe showing her that she's like really investigating this male, and you'd have to be a clever taxidermist to show that kind of action shot of like this female is actually very active in this courtship ritual. But it's is it is often just like, look at this amazing male and then she's back there doing something. Don't we don't really care about.
I think it gets worse, it gets worse than that. So you know, I do write about this a lot in the book, but the bias, and it's particularly picked up by a colleague of mine called Rebecca Maten who who kind of noticed this, this this version what you're talking about, where it's not only that they're in the background, but the females are you know, lower on the shelf or sometimes mounted, like literally bowing down to the males.
The males, as you say, be passed up domineering pose and the and the females are literally kind of head down, face on the floor. This is this is I say, how how dead birds prop up the patriarchy. And it's got absolutely nothing to do with natural history. It doesn't reflect what happens in the wild. What these birds are doing now.
It's like like females are sort of like the Simon Cowell of animals, like in the in terms of these like they will be yeah, if you watch them, like if you want, you'll see like a bower bird really trying to impress a female and she is like scrutinizing him, judging him, and he's the one sort of like no, no, no, please stay like come back, like so it is. It is not it's not only uh, showing bias, but it is inaccurate, right, it is not it's not showing you
the truth. Right. So I think like that's kind of an like it's an important point because I think sometimes people think, like, ah, you know, who cares about like you know, quote unquote feminism in museums, Like that's just that's not science. It's like no, Actually, if you're not paying attention to our kind of weird human gender biases, uh, that will distort what is actually happening in terms of actual animal behavior and what's happening in the natural world exactly.
I think that actually goes beyond the specimens to what we write on the labels as well. So Rebecca mentioned the study of typical naturist museum labels and in those relatively row instances where you have females on display, male and females on display to look at them, the labels on a male specimen in it or say something like you know, this is how the animal eats or moves through its habitat or defends itself or general natural history facts are on the male specimens because on the female
specimens its stories about how the species really produce it, and how they make babies, how they raise their babies, and of course female specimens also eat and move through the habitats and defend themselves, and male specimens also reproduce and once we're babies. But it perpetuates the very human social construct of what gender you know, gender roles are.
So you know, it's it's pushing a human and social construct onto an animal in ways that you know, unhelpful, that it gives a very because an obvious but subconscious message to you any visitor reading that, including kids. So you know, museums do have a role in shape and what people think. And it's not just the specimens, it's also what people write on the labels. And not for nothing, but most people who work in that dressed to medium for women. So it's such an ingrained yeah construct.
Yeah, I mean, well, you know how it is the the male crab goes out to his little job, and then the female crab stays at home in the in the kitchen, raising all the little crab baby. You know. Yeah, we there are like specific examples in nature that seem
to when it likes quote unquote subverts this expectation. Uh, it's like surprising or we see it as for example, like I think some of the myths about say, like spiders, uh is because like there are a few examples of like, yes, the female spiders tend to be larger than the males, So people have a concept that all female spiders will engage in uh, sexual cannibalism, and it's like, well, that's
actually not true. I think it's just that it's surprising enough to people that female arthropod's female spiders tend to be larger than the males that a few examples in which there are female spiders who do engage in sexual cannibalism, and sometimes it's like it's not that they always do it,
but they only do it in certain situations. Turns into this kind of like a myth of like, well, you know how spiders are they flip the script and because they're so big and so scary, they always eat the males after copulation, and so it's a you know, you know, it's kind of like even once you get an example of like, look, this clearly is subverting sort of the human cultural expectations, that too can become mythologized because we see that as an exception rather than something within the
spectrum of many different types of animal behaviors that are very diverse. And there's a lot of different type of spider ma eating behaviors that is not just like a a giant evil female eating the poor little males exactly.
And you know, there's a lot of animals in which the females is bigger than the males for obvious reasons where the one's producing the eggs. So for example, a lot of birds of prey, and most birds of prey probably even the females are bigger snakes and crocodiles as well. And what's interesting is not only that that gender bias I mentioned when more males are on display than females,
that's also true in the stored collections. So it's not just kind of the curatorial bias in what's going on display, but on what science is being done as well. So there are way more males in the stored collections and females, and that bias is actually less strong for species in
which females are bigger, ordet decorated. And but that that bias in the stalled collection is interesting and important to acknowledge, and the scientific point of view, because if you're making study based on, however, many thousand specimens of the given species or given group in a museum, and the majority of those specimens of male, you need to account for
that bias in any conclusions you make. We might you know, in many species, males and females might eat different things, or behave differently, or have different but you know, if you analyze the chemistry, the chemistry will end up being different. So if we're not acknowledging that bias in the science that's being done, we're going to be misrepresenting what females animals are doing. The science gets corrupted too.
I mean, that's it's that's really interesting because that's also the case in medical science that uses say mouse lineages or rat lineages, there's this, uh, this like weird rat sexism where rat or mouse sexism, where often medical studies will only use male male mice or male rats because it's like, ah, yeah, but the females have hormonal cycles that will interfere with our research, and it's like, okay, but you do realize that, uh, in humans, female humans
also have hormonal cycles that might interfere with whatever medical concept that you're studying. So like there's this bias of like, well, we'll just use the male mice because or the male routes because we don't want to really have to have this other variable of the hormones and the female routes
and the female mice. I've been hearing stories right in in terms of like the current sort of in the US, as people probably know, we've been getting this concept that we need to get rid of dei or quote wokeness in research. And so what's been happening is any research that deals with sex or hormones has been targeted for potential defunding. And so I have a friend who is telling me about she's an entomologist, and there's researchers in the US who their content got flagged because they were
looking at sexual diversity in crickets. So this was this is looking at sex ratios in cricket species, and they are you know, we're getting sort of like targeted because it's like, oh, well, you're doing something that is part of a this is not objective, right, You're doing some some sort of like social science with your research. And I think this is kind of a I think for a lot of people, now this is obviously strange and wrong.
But for a while, even before this current political situation, I think that there's been this desire to completely separate the hard science, the hard science, from social sciences, or to have this concept of pure objectivity in say evolutionary biology, that is separate from culture, it's separate from society, and that we don't you know that is it's a political it's it's a kind of like thing on a in a vacuum. So what how do you think is like On the other hand, though, like it is important in
science to have a certain element of objectivity. You want to do research, you want to keep like you said, like having collections that are more objective. Well is important for research in terms of having say like an equal
balance of the sex of different specimens. So what is like a healthy way to balance objectivity with an understanding of how our culture and our society can influence our understanding of evolutionary biology, Like, is what is a way to both acknowledge sort of our biases but also try to achieve this this idea of scientific objectivity.
And I think it goes a lot deeper than evolution biology certainly includes that I think not true His museums represent themselves. As you say, it's a political and scientific meaning that you know, they've excluded themselves from conversations that have been happening in every other kind of museum discipline about the human stories behind that collection. You know, if we pretend this is just a collection of hedgehogs and crickets, then we're ignoring the stories of the circumstances in which
those hedgehogs and crickets are collected. You know, it is obvious, utterly obvious when when you start to think about it, that science is part of culture and is affected by the science society is that it's embedded in Societies are different in parts of the world at different times in history, so that what museums collect, how they display them, how they interpret them, how they study them, how they store them reflect the same prejudices and biases or priorities and
interests as a society that they're happening in. So, you know, we've been starting to say this for the last few years that museum naturist mediums are you know, are starting to realize that. Yeah, so of course where human constructs, yes, museums are not neutral, and that's a good thing. But you know, what's happening in the US at the moment. It's an obvious example of that because they are directly
controlling what science is happening at the moment. And that has always happened that it's in a democratic country, it's what's happening now is pretty extraordinary. So we you know, we're we're at this point and have been for the last really not that long seven or eight years. In naturists museums are kind of acknowledging the fact that science and science museums are not beyond politics. And and I'll say that that notion has kind of crumbled as soon
as you start thinking about it. So we're going through a bit of huge piece of work to kind of add this layer of relevance. And as I said, we are naturist medium that are incredibly important. There's just relevance in tackling climate change by adversity of arts, but we also have a really important role in talking about social justice and the cultural history of our collections and the societies that we represent. So you know's there's two sides
to this. I'd like to think that's why there's a whole trunk in unless in nature's memory, the suicide some one is acknowledging, like the circumstances in which collections were made often exploitative or you know, actively violent, but there were collections made during military campaigns where you know, where European countries or the US were invading other countries and taking that opportunity to build collections, just as they were in places like you know, the British Museum or other
anthropology collections. Our Natrist museums represent the material will be that animal, vegetable and mineral that they're colonizing. The powers were investigating what could be, what would make money, what would be exploded there, and the museums were deliberately built to kind of house those repositories and then also present a positive view of colonization to their audiences and audiences obviously in the in the in the metropology and of
the countries that were doing the colonizing. That's one side of it, just telling more honest stories about how our collections came together. And in doing so, you know, people are pushing against this push against the idea of rewriting history. Obviously, that's all what historians do. That's the job of history
to work out what actually happened. And if it turns out that what we have been thought had been happening isn't actually what happened, then it is you can't really sensibly argue against not reflecting, Oh, we know a bit
better about what the real circumstance is. That's one part of it, but very much related part of that is is you know acknowledging who was involved in those stories in the museums, Like some museums are places of storytelling, and whenever someone is telling a story, you need to think about who are they and who are they telling the story for, and that museums, like all museums, have been telling particular kind of story with a particular kind
of audience in mind for very long. Those stories have elevated certain kinds of people whilst kind of diminishing other kinds of people. So what I guess I'm saying is that we're doing this piece of work to try and recognize and acknowledge and share that the big names behind major discoveries and the history of science didn't work alone, and then the story that we're telling there was a far greater diversity of characters than some we've traditionally told.
So there are you know, countless people of color and women, local and indigenous collectors who have made huge contributions to the history of science and massive discoveries. And it isn't all just about you know, the Charles Darwins and that Alfred Russell Wallace is and the other rich white guys
who made huge contributions. But they didn't work alone. And it does nothing to kind of diminish their accomplishments by saying, actually, that specimen was collected by you know, the local charactor who shared the coreactive of knowledge and expertise and labor
in making those discoveries. So it's just as I said, a the relevance to museums because it means that more people will feel represented in those histories and feel like science, museums and science in general is a place for them and something that people like them have contributed to.
It's also like an interesting like the idea that some guy comes in from on a boat from England, no offense, and goes to some island, sees like all of the behaviors that animals do at any point, comes back tells the stories like we've now discovered everything about these animals because I went on a boat to this place for
a few years. Like, it's such an unrealistic version of how animal observations and this is just talking about observations in the wild, right, like are actually made and how the like how there are so many animals for which it is very difficult to observe them that you have to rely on people who live there to god your research into these animals. So like, you know, things that could be dismissed as local folklore or non scientific, right
because these are observations made by fishermen. Maybe you have a bunch of people who live near where nar waals are, right, and they make these observations. It's like, well, these aren't really scientific, but we don't have anything else, right, Like we kind of mentioned this a little bit earlier about how hard it is to study some of the largest animals in the world, whales, because we don't live there.
There's nobody that lives in the middle of the ocean where we can make observations and see their sort of quotitian lives. Similarly, the best records of animal observations for remote areas where well relatively remote, right remote to us. When we don't live in those areas are going to be made by people who live there. And so if we dismiss those kinds of observations or even cultural stories right that get passed down from generations, we're also dismissing
a huge wealth of knowledge. Right, So, like there are a lot of animal observations that we're now of starting to realize that oh, like this story of say like hawks in sort of the outback like spreading fire that wasn't maybe just metaphorical, They might literally do that. We need to observe them more to know like if they're doing this behavior. But these kinds of cultural stories or observations made by local people are really important data points
that should be respected in that way. And I think having the like not having this like idea that like, well, science comes from you know, a white guy who came in on a boat and suddenly like gave the gift of science to people who were living in this area.
It's like no, Like, observations made over generations is a type of data collect and it's something that is really important should we want to actually engage in research in a way that is, you know, taking into account a type a type of research and a type of data collection that takes years in generations.
To do exactly that. And I mean, even if we did just want to focus on Western science and scientific understanding as the world, which as you say, is pretty narrow a way of looking at things, even making those discoveries required an understanding of how to catch the animals in the first place, which requires know where they're going to be at a certain time of year, a certain kind of day, how they're going to react if you chase them, how where they're going to borrow, you know,
and all of that. I've been studying this collection of Central Australian mammals, which is from the first scientific expedition in Central Australia, and it was it resulted in the collection of a bunch of new mammal species that hadn't been encountered by Europeans before, and all of the labels on these specimens spread across museums across the world to say they were collected by one of two white men on this expedition or associated with this expedition, And having
read their letters, it's clear that they didn't have want of them to collected a single specimen. It was all it was all sudden arevent to the first nations Australian women who were collecting these specimens, and then they were being shipped back to the city, and they were even telling them what was collectible, so that the event of women was that, you know, were directing the collecting efforts
and describing the natural history and providing the specimens. So it's yeah, it's huge roles that have transformed Western scientific understanding of in that case, central Australian mammals.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's just it's the respecting the amount of information that you can get from having the humility to understand that. Like, look, I may have like a lot of knowledge about biology, but if you go to a lot area, like people who have say lived near the Amazon based basin for many generations, they will just intrinsically have sort of a perspective and life experience that can help you. Right, Like it's it's not it doesn't have to be a competition about like oh,
who's more knowledgeable or which method is better. It's like all of these types of methods can work together, right, Like the sort of you know, the scientific method that you are trying to do by collecting specimens and then whatever research you're doing works can work in tandem with the knowledge and data collection of people who live there. It's it's absolutely sort of a symbiotic relationship, not something that is like has to be one or the other
or replaced by one thing. You know, it's a it's sort of a it's just it's all an opportunity to be able to share data together, which I think is something that to me that like, that's one of the most inspiring things about natural history museums is the idea of like humanity collectively sharing uh, just this immense amount of data, uh information and stories about our world, and so understanding that this takes many shapes and forms. That is not just purely like you know, Charles Darwin getting
on a boat and going to an island. No, no offense to Charles Darwin. He was great. But you know, it's it's that is not the only type of uh
kind of natural history that exists. Yeah, before we go, I do want to ask just do you have any like really weird or funny uh stories about something that happens behind the scenes at the Museum of Zoology at Cambridge that you think would like surprise people like, it doesn't have to be super important to science, just something like, you know, because like one thing that UH is like there's this in UH at the Harvard Museum of Natural History,
there's just this like decaying elephant head that's just it's not on display for visitors because it's too kind of creepy looking. But they just sort of shoved it there in one of the one of the research buildings, and this elephant head that's like falling apart. It looks very haunted. Like I I think that if there's like an elephant haunting that happens, it's going to be because of that. But is there any any kind of like weird or funny stories that you can share.
I think this isn't just for Cambridge, but it's definitely true here. I think it's really surprising that the length that museums can go to to change a specimen and so, like it often surprises people to learn that most mammals have in their penis because museums. It's surprising because you will almost never see a mammal skeleton with its penis
bone attacked. So there is one specimen on display here in Cambridge out of how I don't know how many hundreds of skeletons that has a penis bone attached, and it's an elephant seal. But if you go to any European museum, including the UK, you are very unlikely to see a penis bone. Interestingly, Americans are less prudish, but the reason being is that you Victorian curatives have decided to try to spare their visitors blushes or perhaps the giggles or twelve year old boys by taking the penis
spats away. But what that means is that museums have been deliberately misshaping their specimens, so deliberately telling people the wrong thing right about animal anatomy, that there is a bone in most mammals penis And I think that's astonishing that they would do that. And so you go to it thing, right, Yeah, you go to a museum store and they're literally drawers of penis bones.
To me, that's more perverse, right, like it it's way more perverse to like rip the penis pone off the skeleton and put it in a drawer somewhere.
So it's like I was. I was in the California California Academy of Science in San Francisco, and I was walking around kind of impressed how many penis bones place.
And then I was in their store room and I noticed that in the stores like where you've got a kind of a skeleton of say a seal, which obviously in storings are not mounted into into a skeleton Shapey're not articulated.
They are kind of left in boxes because that is much easier to store but also to study. Yeah, and they don't have any human biases attached to them. Is that they had also like so they displayed that they had on the shelves. They had a box with the bones in it of the skeleton, and then the skull separate on the shelf, but then also separate on the shelf next to it was the penis pone. So they also removed the penis bone from the boxes, were kind
of like elevating its importance. But I just don't understand what's going on there, and I asked the curator and I don't know, that's just what.
We do.
Un built tropes.
But you go to go and.
Look around the naturalistic collector a skeleton collection of mammals, and it should be the primates, the rodents. What we used to call the insectivors, which are the moles, shrews and hedgehogs, the anevns, the bats, and the rabbits, and they should have penis pants on most of their species obviously just on the mail, but you will. It's a hearty hard fish to find them.
It reminds me of It makes me think of like sort of artist depictions of male and female skeletons where it's like the female skeleton has like an hourglass shape and it's like, no, no, that's not how. That's not how that works, or like a or like a smaller hip bone than the male. It's like that's not that's not that's not how. That's not how it works. But yeah, no, that that is amazing because it's just like it is.
It's like how our prudishness then leaves people to not understand that actually like, uh, we're kind of the exceptions, Like there are there are other animals that do not have penis bones along with humans and another close human relatives, but like like we are kind of the exception, like most mammals do have penis bones.
Correct, Yeah, this is just like beha and bred y.
Yeah, yeah, just just not like it's like, yeah, either the bonobos don't I think, right, or am I wrong about that?
I can't remember. I want to say, yeah, I can't remember. Yes, yeah, I think chimps.
Have Oh no, they do.
They do.
Both chimpanzees and bonobo's have the penis phone. I'm wondering now if it is just humans that don't have it among primates, or if there are.
Any primary there are there are. I think there are a couple, but they're unusual. You know, there are definitely usual.
We're weird, but because we're the ones making the museums, we're like, no, all your other all your other mammals are weird freaks like not us. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. This has been really really interesting. And where can people get your book? Tell people what it's called and why they should read it. I want to read it now, to be honest.
It's called Native's Memory, Behind the Scenes of the World's Not Christ Museums, and it comes out in twenty fous and a contentiary five and.
So saying so you know all good bookshops, and it's it's it's about how nature is presented to the world in museums and the windows that we provide a naturalist museums that kind of.
Provides a universe and tour of all the world Tristan's games. That's one story. The other stories how we go about telling the human stories and our collections and of the things I mentioned there, so how well at people representation museums and then finally talked about how natrists museums can save the world. That first set stories we're talking about about the research happening air questions much.
Yes, I think if you are concerned about the way that science is being treated right now in the US, reading this would be really interesting because it is like, this is all about how our perspectives can be shaped by sort leads the you know, the decisions of what we elevate in science and then how you know, potentially like going forward and what we can do. So yeah, thank you so much for coming on, and thank you
guys so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show and you leave a rating or review, that really helps me. And thanks to the Space Classics for their super awesome song. Ex Alumina. Creature features a production of iHeartRadio for more podcasts like the When You Just Heard But visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or hey, guess what, wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I can't tell you what to do. I will see you next Wednesday, m hm