Why specimens are collected...
So we strung up a lot of bird nets and we captured things like wattle-eyes which are little flycatchers. We got blue billed finches. We got pygmy king fishers. We collected these and other birds and we brought them back to the museum. We collected tissues from these for genetic analysis and we collected alcoholic specimens. In other words, unlike old times, where maybe they just obtained a museum skin, today we collect lots of different kinds of things like skeletons and tissues and alcoholic specimens that scientists will be using.
This little yellow bird on the right - it's new to science. It is a forest robin. We're coming back to species concepts. When we collected this in 1996, we said oh, it's a forest robin. We brought it back to the museum and we really started looking more closely at it and we said hey, there is no forest robin like this. All the other things that are called forest robin - one species, the forest robin - are all different from one another and they're different from this. So we studied this situation more thoroughly. It's immensely common at Dzanga Sangha. You hear it calling all over the place and no one had understood that there was something interesting about forest robins.
|