Like the adage about the old man planting trees whose shade he won\u2019t live to sit under, I spend much of my spare time collecting, assembling, curating, and otherwise maintaining a massive collection of aphids most of which I will not live to study.\u00a0 My plan all along has been to build the best collection I could, given the constraints of funding, person-power, time, and space, and then donate it to major museums around the world to benefit science for decades or centuries to come.\u00a0 In these times of extreme domination of global politics by the wealthy and multi-national corporations, the running rampant of capitalism, the extreme poverty of parts of the world together with extreme income inequality in other parts of the world, the continued plunder of the Earth\u2019s natural systems, the great influence of the military industrial complex, the increase in the police state in so-called free countries, etc. and so forth, one can sometimes feel that any task with a long-term pay-off is wasted effort.\u00a0 In order for a thing like an aphid collection to be useful in decades to come, human society has to survive intact with its ability to conduct and appreciate science.\u00a0 Some days, watching my Twitter feed, I wonder whether human society will collapse in the coming century and lose its interest in biodiversity or simply lose its capability to be concerned or do anything about it.\u00a0 In times like this I get creeping feelings that all my work on my collection is for naught because we may be at the end of an era of human society wherein study of the natural world is supported or believed to be worthy.\u00a0 By the time I die, or by the time 2100 rolls around, will biodiversity collections be a ghost of the past, destroyed or neglected like the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the pyramids of Egypt, or history books in the U.S.A.?<\/p>\n
These are the thoughts that wriggle through my consciousness as I tend my collection of aphids.\u00a0 More than 12,000 slides, that has been a lot of sample processing, label writing, identification, and collection curation.\u00a0 This winter, I am tackling a long-overdue task of re-labeling a few hundred slides from my graduate school days when I believed I would carve off a bunch of Macrosiphum<\/em> species to form a new genus, \u201cRobinsonaphis.\u201d\u00a0 Having been correctly dissuaded from this move by my wiser colleagues and mentors, this aphid genus was never published.\u00a0 But, my collection has many slides in it optimistically labeled with this genus name back in 1996.<\/p>\n Relabeling slides from the early 1990s.<\/p><\/div>\n And as in every winter, I am databasing all the slides I make, electronically filing them before filing them in the real world.\u00a0 The main reason for this databasing is to make my collection accessible to colleagues while I\u2019m alive, and to make it easier to donate to the California Academy of Sciences after I die.\u00a0 For my everyday work the database is rarely used.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/aphidtrek.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Curation-xii-2017.jpg\")
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