How northern Canada’s animals end up in museums across North America

Photo submitted by Dianna Krejsa Students and faculty at Kansas University stand behind some of the 370 specimens prepared during "prepapalooza" in December.

Claire McFarlane
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Cabin Radio

In museum collections across North America, you can find hundreds of tiny mice, shrews and voles who lived their lives in the Northwest Territories. Their final journey involves freezers, beetles and dozens of students.

Before finals began at the University of Kansas last month, more than 25 students spent 11 days in a lab mounting previously-frozen animals through taxidermy.

The process of mounting involves preparing the animal to make it appear lifelike for display or study.

In an event dubbed “prepapalooza,” the team mounted about 370 birds and mammals from across North America – including some that had come to Kansas from the Northwest Territories.

The event is meant to free up the university’s freezer space at the end of the year. Working with the animals also provides students with valuable hands-on experience while brushing up on their anatomy and improving their taxidermy, said Dianna Krejsa, collection manager of mammals at the university.

“There was so much fervour,” said Krejsa, “and everyone was working so hard that we were starting to run out of specimens.”

KU’s mammalogy collection is more than 180,000 specimens strong, ranking it among the five largest in the world.

The animals collected are used for display and research at the university. The data associated which each specimen, like their DNA and RNA-related information, is placed in global databases such as VertNet and GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

Krejsa said the university’s work is intended to “support future questions that have not yet been asked.”

She used a hypothetical example of someone studying the conservation of caribou. They could use samples from two geographic areas, housed in the university’s collection, to compare differences in genetic makeup.

SUBHEADLINE: How the journey starts

Specimens from the N.W.T. mounted during prepapalooza made their way from the North to the American Midwest by way of the territory’s Small Mammal Survey.

As an N.W.T. wildlife biologist who worked with small mammals, Dr. Suzanne Carrière said she would often try to fill small freezers in the territorial government’s warehouse.

Her chest freezer was big enough to fit hundreds of mouse, shrew and vole specimens, but small enough that another scientist might not attempt to fit in a moose head that could potentially break the brittle bones of a small animal.

“Among biologists, we kind-of raid other people’s freezers and we make space for our own stuff, so my freezer was always kept small for that reason,” said Carrière with a laugh.

Carrière worked for the GNWT from 1996 until her retirement in 2023. These days, she runs a Facebook group called N.W.T. Species and shares detailed water-colour paintings of small animals.

In her time with the GNWT, she played an important role in the territory’s annual Small Mammal Survey, which has helped populate global databases that inform the work of researchers around the world. 

Modelled after similar surveys performed at the Kluane Lake Research Station located in Silver City, Yukon, the Small Mammal Survey has been conducted in communities across the N.W.T. since 1990. 

A spokesperson from the territory’s Department of Environment and Climate Change (ECC) said the survey is designed to monitor changes in the abundance of voles, mice and shrews across the territory.

“This monitoring can help predict the abundance of some furbearer species, which rely on small mammals for food, and provide insights into links between small mammal population fluctuations and the breeding success of other animals,” said the spokesperson. 

Large fluctuations in small mammal populations happen roughly every three to four years and affect other parts of the food chain. 

When there are plenty of arctic foxes, martens, and rough-legged hawks, that can often be traced to a similar increase in the population of their prey.

In August each year, 100 survey traps are set out for five nights in Inuvik, Norman Wells, Fort Simpson, Fort Liard, Yellowknife, Daring Lake (near the Nunavut border northeast of Yellowknife), Gahcho Kué, Fort Smith, Fort Resolution and Tsu Lake (southeast of Fort Resolution).

Snap traps and live traps are checked every morning throughout the survey period by wildlife biologists, technicians, renewable resource officers and volunteers.

Any animals that are live trapped are recorded and released. Anything caught in the snap traps is identified, collected and labelled, said an ECC spokesperson.

Collected specimens are brought to a GNWT warehouse in Yellowknife.

When she began working for the GNWT, Carrière decided she would send specimens to museums who could preserve and make use of the animals.

While it took some time to find institutions who would accept regular donations, she eventually established a network of organizations occasionally willing to take them in. That network has included universities and museums in Ottawa, Alaska, New Mexico and, of course, Kansas.

Carrière said she wanted to spread out the specimens geographically and institutionally, so that if something were to happen to one museum or a collection, samples would survive elsewhere.

SUBHEADLINE: Using beetles to prepare specimens

The Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa is one recipient of the specimens.

In 2019, Carrière shipped around 2,500 animals to the institution. It is still working to process that donation as, without the benefit of eager students to assist, there is only one person at the museum who can work on them.

But that doesn’t mean they are completely unassisted.

The museum is among many that use flesh-eating beetles – known as dermestid beetles – to clean remaining tissue from specimen skeletons.

Partially cleaned skeletons are placed into an aquarium filled with thousands of hungry beetles and beetle larvae.

“These pick away at most of the remaining muscle and leave a relatively clean skeleton while limiting the risks associated with other methods for cleaning carcasses,” said Greg Rand, assistant collection manager at the museum. 

This method for preparing specimens was pioneered at Kansas University by a naturalist named Charles Bunker, said Krejsa, who noticed the beetles feasting on dead animals around the turn of the 20th century.

Rand said the Canadian Museum of Nature only operates the colony of beetles outdoors in the warmer months, to mitigate the risk that the beetles escape their enclosure and munch on other items in the museum, such as study skins that the insects might find appetizing.

The museum’s collection contains roughly 85,000 study skins, pelts, mounts and skeletons from about 600 different species. The oldest mammal in its collection is from 1828.

Rand said the majority of the collection is located in a purpose-built storage facility in Gatineau, Quebec and is about as big as six hockey rinks. He likened it to a modernized version of something out of the Indiana Jones movie Raiders of the Lost Ark.

SUBHEADLINE: Informing discoveries

Museum collections have assisted in scientific studies that help researchers better understand the effect of humans on the natural world, and have helped influence public policy.

Rand gave the example of how a study of eggshells housed in museum collections helped identify the insecticide DDT as the cause of eggshell thinning in birds across North America in the 1970s. This was a significant factor in the decline of bird populations, as brittle eggs would be crushed before they could hatch.

The studies helped pave the way for a DDT ban in Canada and the United Sates. 

In the N.W.T., Carrière said conducting the Small Mammal Survey with volunteers has helped people learn about the furry neighbours living almost undetected in their communities.

“We have seven species of shrews and nobody ever sees them, because they’re just so small,” said Carrière.

“For people to have a really good look at them, it’s really interesting just in their face, how they’re noticing that in the forest where they’ve lived all their lives, there’s animals – mammals, we’re not talking about small insects, we’re talking about mammals – that they have never seen before.”

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