Dr. Bronwyn W. Williams @BWWilliamsLab@qoto.org

Although the collections at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences are housed behind the scenes, out of the public eye, they are NOT top secret! The NCMNS Non-molluscan Invertebrates Collection contains one of the largest & most historically important collections of marine invertebrates in - and of - the Mid-Atlantic & Southeastern U.S. Our online presence (e.g., on GBIF) is minimal at present for 🤯 *reasons*, but that WILL change.

Recently, Megan McCuller (NCMNS Collections Manager of Non-molluscan Invertebrates, aka my partner in ‘crime’) and I spoke with Trista Talton, staff writer for Coastal Review. What came from it was a wonderful article that just dropped today.
https://coastalreview.org/2022/12/spineless-specimens-may-hold-clues-for-coastal-researchers/
TL;DR - Museum collections are an invaluable and powerful resource.

Here’s the reported “fiddler crab on steroids.” Now, although not a fiddler - it’s a blue land crab, Cardisoma guanhumi - I will admit that I would be startled hearing scratching at my office door, opening it to find this not-small asymmetrically-clawed crustacean. A museum curator’s job is never dull. #crustmas #crustacea #crustaceans #crabs #collection #CollectionsCare #digitization #25daysofcrustmas #malacostraca #museumspecimen #decapoda

Every so often we stumble across a specimen record that makes us laugh for days. This is one of them. We recently acquired the South Carolina DNR’s Southeast Regional Taxonomic Center marine collection, and are working to integrate the metadata into our database. #crabs #crustacea #crustaceans #MuseumCollections #museum #CollectionsCare #curation #crustmas #25daysofcrustmas #malacostraca

My lab is interested in sharing what we do behind the scenes, research and collections. We are stewards of a wonderful biological resource and are looking for ways to make it accessible. Here are some of the things we are doing - some far more slowly than others - to this end: #photography #3dmodeling #3dprinting #animation (and ultimately #gamedesign ) all in addition to digitizing data, and finding ways to tell the stories that underlie each and every specimen. #museum

I am Research Curator of Non-molluscan Invertebrates at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. That’s a mouthful, I know, but by way of explanation, I oversee a large hyper-diverse (>25 phyla) natural history/research collection AND have my own research program, focusing mainly on crayfishes and two groups of obligate crayfish symbionts (branchiobdellidans aka crayfish worms and entocytherid ostracods).