Rare UK beetle is six millionth specimen to be digitised by Natural History Museum

Marking 10 years of digitisation, the Museum has digitised its 6 millionth specimen, a forest caterpillar hunter beetle rarely found in the UK.

Digitisation enhances global access to the collections, transforming research capability and impact. Over 4,500 scientific papers cite our digital collection with three new publications per day citing our data on average.

The Natural History Museum today announces that its 6 millionth specimen has been digitised. The specimen is a ground beetle, Calosoma sycophanta known as the forest caterpillar hunter, a beautiful metallic green species. Common across Europe but rarely found in the UK, with the Museum only having eight in the collection, some of which have been located within the stomachs of birds.

Blue whales are the largest specimen to have a digital record on the Data Portal whilst the smallest specimen, a tiny fairyfly wasp (Tinkerbella nana) is the only species in a genus of smallest insects in the world and was identified by Museum Scientist John Noyes in 2013. Over the past 10 years, the team have developed innovative ways to scale up digitisation efforts, ranging from using AI to speed up the transcription process to reducing human error through use of barcodes to automatically assign specimens into the correct taxon and location.

Helen Hardy, Deputy Head of Digital, Data and Informatics at the Natural History Museum says, “By digitising the Museum’s collection on the Data Portal, we are sharing vital data that shows how our world has changed over time. This is key information that scientists need to safeguard our planet for the future Over the last decade we have seen 40 billion records downloaded from the Portal over 1 million download events and more than 4,500 papers cite our digital collection on topics from climate change to human health to crop security.

“This brilliant beetle with the revelation of its last meal is a shining example of how digitisation can unlock greater understanding of our collection.”

Accelerating the digital discoverability of natural history collections is essential for accessibility: it opens the collections to global communities, improves searchability to make collections-based research more efficient, and minimises damage to specimens by reducing unnecessary physical handling and transportation whilst also allowing for faster detection of pests. Digitising the Museum’s entire collection of 80 million specimens is estimated to benefit the UK economically by over £2 billion.[1] The Museum’s plans to create a collections, research and digitisation centre in Reading will accelerate the digitisation of the 28 million specimens moving.

Science Minister Lord Vallance said, “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.”

Six millionth specimen

Digitising this forest caterpillar hunter has allowed Museum scientists an insight into the beetle’s last meal – using a hirox microscope to produce high-resolution photographs, we were able to spot scales around its mouth. Further investigation has shown these to be lepidoptera scales, indicating that the beetle’s last meal was a moth. Digitisation with images can enhance our scientific knowledge of these species and provide valuable insights.

Max Barclay Senior Curator in Charge, Coleoptera says, “Our collections at the Natural History Museum date back hundreds of years, providing a baseline of biodiversity before many of the human interventions started to dramatically change our world. Our digitisers are often the first people in decades to comb through the specimens and their labels one by one. They are not only sharing these vital resources with the world, but contributing to new scientific knowledge as they do this.

“Calosoma sycophanta is a rare beetle in the UK that has been previously known to eat caterpillars - the young of adult moths. It's only through digitising the mouth parts of this beetle that we have new scientific evidence that this beetle also eats adult moths, and this specimen did this as its last meal before it died.”

Natural history specimens and their data are critically important for scientists to understand how populations have changed over time. This is particularly important for the ground beetles who are a known predator of two invasive species of forest caterpillars notable for causing destruction to forests. These forest moths include the oak processionary (Thaumetopoea processionea) and pine processionary (Thaumetopoea pityocampa). They create tent-like nests high in the trees, often in colonies of hundreds, which can remove all leaves from a tree. This can kill a tree, which need leaves to absorb the sunlight to create energy.

Digitising the Museum’s coleoptera collection allows scientists to develop a better understanding of the evolutionary history of this important insect group. Being able to share data globally on when this caterpillar and its predator started to spread across the world could be key in more easily identifying invasive species in the future.

ENDS

[1] A 2021 report

Notes to Editors

Assets

Images are available here.

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