NSF Mosquito Program
Between 2001 and 2003, the Museum acquired four major
collections: 1) the Lewis Nielsen collection, of about 78,000 specimens, 2) the
Tom Zavortinkcollection of over 44,000 mosquitoes, 3) the Ralph Barr collection
of 41,000 specimens, and 4) the Bruce Eldridge collection of 10,000 snow pool mosquitoes.
The four collections increased the Bohart Museum mosquito collection to almost 500,000
specimens, and added nearly 400 species.
The Bohart Museum now houses one of the three largest mosquito collections in the
world. As a result of this NSF funded project our mosquito collection is now probably
the best curatedin the world.
In 2004 the Museum was awarded a US National Science Foundation collections grant
to incorporate and re-curate these collections. In the course of the project a number
of curatorial issues had to be addressed including remounting point-mounted adults,
replacing bad corks and vials in alcohol preserved materials, labeling or re-labeling
slide-mounted specimens, replacing field numbers with detailed labels and re-housing
and intercalating the collections into a single well-curatedone.
Mosquito specimens are preserved in a variety of ways in the collection. Adults
are all pinned and stored dry in glass-topped drawers. Pinned adult mosquitoes are
housed in 256 drawers and includes 38 genera, 1009 species, and 23 drawersof unidentified
mosquitoes. Larvae and pupae are stored in alcohol or mounted onglass slides. The
alcohol collection of mosquitoes is now housed in 353 (125 ml and 474 ml) specimen
jars. Slide-mounted specimens are housed in 387 100-slide boxes (roughly 30,000
slide-mounted specimens).