Housing roughly 1.5 million specimens of insects within its metal drawers, the N.C. State Insect Museum holds a population of insects that rivals the population of humans in the whole of Manhattan.
With more than 40,000 species, the museum carries one of the most impressive collections in the United States, with researchers around the country turning to the collection for the information it stores.
The bugs are arranged by phylogenetic order, or by how they are related. There are sections for bees and wasps, butterflies and moths, beetles, flies, and other phyla. The museum holds everything from African beetles to North Carolinian cicadas. It even includes the first specimen in a collection of the only species of mayfly that lives in North America.
However, the collection focuses mainly on hemiptera, an order of insects known as “true bugs” that includes leafhoppers, cicadas, stink bugs and aphids.
“I often tell people that it’s a little bit like a library here,” said Bob Blinn, museum curator since 1987.
Blinn’s interest in insects began when he was studying for his undergraduate degree. After taking an entomology class, he was inspired by his professor to continue in the field.
“I grew up watching National Geographic and Wild Kingdom on TV,” Blinn said. “I always liked the idea of being somebody that described species and worked with collections, and there is much more opportunity to find new species of insects than species of mammals, birds and vertebrates in general.”
It doesn’t take much to maintain the bugs, other than making sure they don’t get eaten by moths or get moldy, Blinn said. The adult insects are stored by being pinned and labeled, and they make up the majority of the collection. Immature insects like caterpillars, larva and other soft-bodied insects need to be stored in vials of alcohol, while the smallest of the insects are stored on microscope slides for easier studying.
“The insects will really last, literally forever,” Blinn said. “We have specimens here that [are] more than 100 years old and a lot that are close to 100 years old.”
Blinn is kept busy, however, because he constantly receives new material for the museum. Through the combination of his collections, N.C. State researchers’ collections, student collections and donations, he spends most of his day organizing and labeling insects.
“Through those duties sometimes I’ll stumble across things that will strike me as new,” Blinn said.
In 2011, Blinn came across a new assassin bug. It was so different from other known assassin bugs that it merited its own genus.
“It’s the first new species in this sub-family that’s been described in 50 years,” Blinn said.
This is mainly because nobody really looks, Blinn said. Blinn found the new species of assassin bug, which he eventually named Arenaocoris enerviatus –veinless, sand-loving bug – when he was identifying species sent in from Mississippi State.
Unable to classify the bug, he began to look for other instances of the species. He found specimens already in museums – even the Smithsonian – and eventually acquired about 12. Curators, not knowing what they were offhand, had left them in the yet-to-be-identified material. Once Blinn had collected enough specimens, he classified them as a new species.
“Once you start looking at them under a microscope and studying the differences between the genera and the species you start to see what we call the characters, or the morphological features that make these things what they are and distinct,” Blinn said. “You start getting an appreciation for what these things are all about.”
The department hopes to gain more space for displays and storage as buildings on Centennial Campus are finished. It now has a digital record system that anyone can access online and use to scroll through the specimens.
