By Steven Scarpa, Associate Director of Marketing and Communications
Museums across the country hold approximately 500 million to 1 billion biological specimens. Accredited zoos hold roughly 800,000 living animals. And, yet, despite the sheer volume of data each type of institution collects, they don’t often work or connect with each other in meaningful ways.
A new project called the “Zoo Museum (ZooMu) Network” lead by principal investigators at Yale Peabody Museum, Memphis Zoo, Florida International University and Audubon Nature Institute will remedy that. These four organizations have already built a network with dozens of natural history museums and zoos and aquariums across the US. The National Science Foundation has awarded a $500,000 five-year grant to expand the network to additional zoos and natural history museums.
The goal of the project, which has been in development since 2019, is to develop long lasting networks between the two fundamentally different but related biological collections, extending participation in science beyond academia. Because museums and zoos play crucial roles in public education and access to nature and biodiversity, it is important to make sure the specimens and data held in each are linked, something that is not the case currently.
By integrating zoo and museum databases, both kinds of institutions will have the opportunities to expand conservation and global change research. “The Peabody has always been a leader in the creation of digital databases,” said Gregory Watkins-Colwell, the Peabody’s Senior Collections Manager, Vertebrate Zoology, Herpetology and Ichthyology.
“Museums can be good at understanding the last instant of an animal’s life, but are less facile at knowing what happens before,” Watkins-Colwell said. This is where the rich data found at zoos can come in. When an animal dies at a zoo, the remains often end up at natural history museums, he explained, but the medical information from its life might not. The data might have been passed between people who knew each other, but not through any formal structure or agreement.
As Sinlan Poo, Curator of Research at the Memphis Zoo, puts it, “In many ways, zoos and natural history museums are perfect partners since they are almost mirror images of each other – with zoos having a wealth of information an animal while it’s alive and museums containing and building on information of the animal after it is preserved.” And while it may seem like a no-brainer for these two institutions to work together, these partnerships are still far from the norm.
What is particularly timely as we’re faced with rapid rates of biodiversity loss is that “zoos and aquariums are increasingly focused on holding rare and endangered species, and have vast amounts of data on life history, animal health, behavior, and genetics. This same data would be very difficult or impossible to collect on increasingly rare wild animals,” says Steven Whitfield, Director of Terrestrial and Wetlands Conservation at the Audubon Nature Institute. Goals of the ZooMu Network are to facilitate data collection, data sharing, and sample sharing from zoo animals with outside conservation organizations, which can lead to improved field conservation campaigns.
“ZooMu will help formalize partnerships between Zoos and Museums, making information more widely available and creating opportunities for better, more collaborative science," said Alex Shepack, a researcher at Florida International University.
“A natural history museum will be able to look back at all the things that happened during an animal’s lifetime. For people who study things like disease, they will be able to look at the physical specimen and know what happened ten years ago because there are veterinary records to explain what happened,” Watkins-Colwell said. “If you have a specimen, and a collection that has a vet record you might be able to answer if that morphology is from something that happened when it was a hatchling.”
Through a series of topic-focused and regional-based workshops, conference symposia, and webinars, the ZooMu Network aims to create a new culture of collaboration between these institutions, with long-lasting bonds that will truly bridge the gap between living and preserved biodiversity collections.
“Once we connect these dots, we will have the full picture of the life history of an animal,” Watkins-Colwell said.
For more information about the grant, visit zoomunetwork.org