MPEG Invertebrates Collection

Curator: Dr. Orlando Tobias Silveira
email: orlando@museu-goeldi.br

The Invertebrates Collection consists of around two million examples, half of these being display mounted insects, stored in around 1400 drawers. The biggest collections are the Hymenoptera, Coleoptera, Diptera e Lepidoptera orders. In December 2010, the museum computed the storage of 2200 specimen-types (holotypes and paratypes) from 300 species of insects. The collections stored in wet mediums, include examples of insects (especially termites (Isoptera) and soil mesofauna), Arachnids, Crustaceans, Chilopoda, Diplopoda and Mollusks (2780 batches). There are around 10,000 batches of non-insect invertebrates, with about 4000 of these being computerized. These collections are now going through a unique historical phase involving important advancements and considerable collection increases, including the creation of new invertebrate collections such as; Annelids (Oligochaeta), Nematodes, Platyhelminthes, Cnidarians and Echinoderms. The area used for the wet medium collection has been recently reorganized with significant changes to its infrastructure. The arachnid collections, especially the Araneae collection, has seen an exponential level of growth over recent years, there currently being a total of 5000 cataloged and computerized types of spider, and more recently, the Crustacean collection too, with 840 batches counted by the end of 2010. An excellent indicator in terms of the growth and overall usage of this collection is the number of specimen types deposited in the last four years; a total of 12 holotypes and 61 paratypes belonging to a total of 16 new scientific species. The second biggest collection of arachnids is scorpions, consisting of 5 holotypes and 31 paratypes belonging to a total of 5 species. The Crustacean and Mollusk collections have also been completely computerized. Other types of wet medium invertebrates are also in the process of being computerized, as well as dry medium Hexapods, with particular emphasis on Hymenoptera, Orthoptera and Diptera, consisting of more than 35,000 computerized records in December 2010.