Six millionth specimen digitised reveals beetle’s last meal

Over the last decade we have digitised six million specimens, all of which have a story to tell and the potential to save our planet.

Our collections contain over 80 million items spanning the 4.56-billion-year history of life on Earth – and we plan to digitise them all. By sharing this vital collection and all its information with the public, we can show how our world has changed over time and indicate how we can safeguard our planet for the future.

The digitisation team have also developed innovative processes to scale up their efforts. From pioneering the automation of assigning specimens into the correct group and location to reduce human error, to using artificial intelligence to speed up the transcription process, our researchers are constantly refining the process.

Lord Patrick Vallance, the UK Science Minister, says “By digitising their wealth of priceless specimens, the team at the Natural History Museum are making this unique trove of information readily available to inform the work of researchers, right across the planet. This is a unique and special resource.”

“The difference that making these data available to research ranging from climate change to biodiversity cannot be overstated. That’s why we are spending £155 million over the coming decade to digitally catalogue the natural science collections held across the UK, backed by public funding.”

How beetles can boost the economy

A 2021 report estimated that digitising our entire collections would provide economic benefits in excess of £2 billion. This could occur through, for example, the better and faster detection of pests and their predators.

Our six millionth specimen to be digitised is a ground beetle Calosoma sycophanta, known as the forest caterpillar hunter. While fairly common in Europe, the beetle is occasionally found in the UK, and within the collections we only have a handful of specimens.

These individuals and their data are therefore useful in understanding how the insect’s population size has changed over time. This is important because, as the name suggests, the forest caterpillar hunter is a known predator of caterpillars, including two invasive species that cause massive destruction to forests.

The oak processionary and pine processionary moths produce social caterpillars that form colonies of hundreds of individuals high in trees. They have a distinctive habit of moving about in nose-to-tail processions as a group and when feeding can remove all the leaves from a tree. Without leaves, the trees are unable to absorb the sunlight and so die.

While most animals are unable to eat the caterpillar due to their irritating hairs, the beetles are not deterred.

Biological control with natural predators is vital to keep populations of pests such as the moths under control. One of the hardest aspects of this is identifying any potential pests or beneficial predators quickly enough, which is where the digitisation of the beetles can come in.

A better understanding of species and how they interact with each other can help keep human intervention to a minimum. Digitisation of collections provides faster access to specimens and other research datasets, facilitating quicker detection and identification.

Digitising our specimens helps us now, but we can also use it to predict the future.

Understanding climate stress

Over the past century, insects have been getting increasingly stressed, which manifests in their very bodies.

Dr Richard Gill is a researcher at Imperial College London who has used images of hundreds of bumblebees collected over decades to show that stress due to the climate crisis changes the physical shape of the insects.

While bumblebees usually have symmetrical wings, stress during development can cause the insects to grow differently shaped right and left wings.

By comparing how the asymmetry of bee wings has changed over time to data on the environmental conditions that were occurring when the bees were alive, Richard and his colleagues have determined that the bees were more stressed when the weather conditions were hotter and wetter.

“Our work starts to explain when, where and potentially how this stress is being placed on these bumblebees,” Richard explains. “By using digital collections to look at the last 100 years of data, we get a better framework for understanding and forecasting where and when populations will be most at risk.”

What’s next?

It’s not just bumblebees that will benefit from better understanding how a changing world is impacting nature.

Our planet is altering quickly due to human activities, but historically it has been hard for businesses and policymakers to measure biodiversity and use that evidence to inform better decisions.

Our researchers are trying to tackle this with the Biodiversity Intactness Index. This uses data on more than 58,000 species of plants, fungi, and animals from around the world, to show how local biodiversity is responding to human pressures. This can then be used to predict how biodiversity will change in any one place in response to future management decisions.

But in order to continue this work, scientists will need access to even more biodiversity data.

A key source of this data is from digitising museum collections. A 2023 study looked at the global natural history collections held in 73 museums found in 28 countries and discovered that collectively these institutions hold 1,147,934,687 objects. However, only around 16% of these objects are digitally discoverable and available for study by anyone, anywhere in the world.

Focusing in on the UK, our natural science collections hold more than 137 million items. These collections are among the world’s most geographically, historically and taxonomically important. Over the next ten years, we will be taking the experience of digitising our own specimens to a next level as we lead a new national programme to help digitise UK collections found at other institutions.

Speeding up scientific research

Over the last ten years, the digitisation of our collections has seen 49 billion records downloaded in over one million download events.

This has resulted in over 4,500 papers citing our digital collection on topics ranging from conservation and human health to crop security, with an average of three new publications per day now citing our data.

Digital collections have transformed the efficiency and scope of what is now possible in science. By expanding and enhancing this process we’ll be able to continue helping researchers answer some of the most critical questions of our time.