It is a Tuesday morning and I have a stinking cold. I have this now as yesterday I spent the day recovering from the last three weeks and so my body thought it was time to give me all the infections that had been going around the department previously which it had been storing up for a special occasion!

The melt down has occurred through a culmination of the collection moving, a synoptic collection being created and the hosting of the Dipterists Forum at the weekend based in the New Darwin Centre. However it was fab. For months now I had been organising catering, room booking, way-signs etc etc with the rest of the team being enlisted to make labels, print forms, lug equipment around etc. And yet still on Saturday morning when everyone turned up there were still things that went wrong (not helped by the tube shutting both the district and circle lines!!! ). I guess that had to be expected.

But we had four fabulous talks on Saturday morning to an audience of just under 60 in the new Neil Chalmers Lecture theatre. First up was Chris Thompson (eminent American Dipterologist) who talked about the state of Diptera identification from it's beginnings to now. It is always lovely to hear someone from the States to say how brilliant the UK is about certain things, one of which is level of which our fauna is studied and the passion of the wider community for recording etc. This is seen with things like the hoverfly recording scheme. Looking at a world map showing spots where records had been added to GBIF etc. The UK is absolutely covered with the rest of the world showing a distinct lack of sites (apart from Chris's backyard!).

Next was the fabulous Geoff Hancock (Glasgow Museum - all the more fabulous for stepping in at late notice) who gave a talk on specific craneflies that you could identify through the pupal cases that they left behind. This is a secondary character that enables ecologists to monitor populations without killing any of the specimens so are crucial when dealing with rare and/or endangered species.

After coffee we started with Graham Rotheray (Edinburgh Museum) who discussed higher Dipteran larvae, specifically their feeding apparatus. Some excellent photographs showing the very reduced structures associated with the heads. And finally Stuart Ball who gave a talk on recent work on Hoverflies. Lot's of fun with modelling of the data! We dragged everyone upstairs to our lovely new common room giving a few people vertigo on the way for lunch! The afternoon resumed with the AGM followed by individual recording groups detailing the years activity. Some lovely photographs supplied by Judy Webb for Peter Chandlers Mycetophila talk.

Then off to the pub! followed by a meal. Brilliant

The next day a fair number of people returned to the museum for a tour and then to play in the collections! The tour started with Hannah Cornish giving an introduction and show round of the AMC for UK biodiversity.

They were impressed by the space and hopefully you will see some workshops on Diptera identification being run from there soon. Next was the UK Diptera synoptic collection. This collection was finished on Friday at 4.15pm!! Nigel Wyatt, Kim G, Hannah and I have worked solidly over the last two weeks to get the collection in. I was a walking zombie often leaving past nine at night. One night even my Mum helped although she did spend a fair amount of time laughing at all the species names. But against much adversity it was completed (albeit the slide and the ones that we had no pads for! they turned up this morning!) But by the time the tour started 250 drawers were in the synoptic collection and being looked over by the amateur specialists. It was such a lovely site.

We then carried up to see the spirit collection (and try and presuade them that they wanted to help sort material ) followed by a look in the imaging lab. Finally we showed them the cocoon ends and the main British and World collection in their new homes. They loved it! People split off and either corrected the synoptic collection, retrieved data off labels, used the collection to aid in identifications, or generally just nosed around 'ohhing' and 'ahhing' every now and again. People donated material and there were many offers of future donations to fill the main gaps in the collection

We have decided to hold another session similar to this in February before the sampling kicks in again to provide opportunities for the group to cross check material etc. My highlights were the hedgehog fly and i have to say I was very impressed with some of the Tachinids (not a group i usually look at). Stuart Balls comment of having walk through genitalia was my favourite of the day

So I am in the new Darwin Centre and unpacked. And I have to say it is lovely. I have my specimens that I am working on in a cabinet directly behind me. I have a spacious desk with all my catalogues arranged close by. I have a wet lab for sorting my specimens in alcohol a minute away. And it is so light that desk lamps are redundant. And I have a foot rest. I can finally get back to work (there is still the minor problem of the collection that is yet to move into the building though….early November for that and my, it will be crazy). And I have to find a quick route from my desk to the staff entrance..

My bay

View from our floor over the Cocoon

Yesterday, though, I got to work on some recuration. I had lent (and by that I mean the Museum) all of our Sisyrnodytes specimens to a researcher in South Africa. These are a genus of Robber flies and the researcher in question is a leading authority. The specimens returned some while ago but I have not been able to put them back in the collection as he had designated one a Lectotype and described two new species from the material.

When new species are discovered and named, if it comes from a series then the author may choose to call all of the specimens from the same collecting event etc ‘Syntypes’ (we often have 10+ syntypes). This is not very helpful when it comes to descriptions, so what often happens is that one of them at a later point will be designated a Lectotype. To have this accepted along with the new species that he described, he needed to publish his descriptions.

This has now happened so I am able to link the material to the publication, update our system and reinstate the material (all lovingly housed in new Museum standard trays) back into the collection. I have now only another couple of thousand drawers to recurate and a whole lot more of unidentified material…..

old style drawers:

And my nice new ones

We are off on fieldwork tomorrow. We have five days based in BridgNorth, near Wolverhampton….Not familiar at all with the area so it should be interesting. It is with the Dipterists Forum and I think that there will be about 10 of us.Today and yesterday the three of us from the Museum that are going have been organising our equipment. We have nets, microscopes, wellies, id guides etc etc that are waiting to be loaded up.

These trips are brilliant for many reasons. We get to run round the countryside, we learn a lot more about the British Fauna and we get to socialise with some of the top Dipterists in the UK. We are prioritising at the moment for species that we don’t have in our collection. It does seem odd that there are some UK species missing from the national collection but it has not been a collection priority for a while.

This is all changing with the opening of the Angela Marmont Centre for UK biodiversity. With over 7000 species of fly in the UK we should be kept busy hunting for a while

The museums business is all about taxonomy. We spend days studying specimens, trying to identify new material from other specimens within the collection and working through all the published material relating to the species or similar species. If you have ever read a taxonomic paper to say that they are dry is to say that Oliver Reed occasionally liked a wee tipple.... They are in a world of their own and each group of insects I have ever worked with have their own style of writing or different diagnostic characteristics that I have to get my head around.

I have just been reviewing a paper that is comparing the thoracic spiracular gills of a pupae of a limoniid, often referred to as pupal horns . My volunteers and I often work on a much more simpler taxonomy.

Yesterday for example I had a volunteer (another museum member of staff who helps out ever now and again to play with my cool flies) who was sorting through material that was collected from a malaise trap (this is very similar to a tent that traps flying insects) from Kenya in 1970. We have hundreds of jars like this that need sorting!. He was very excited about the stalk-eyed fly with boxing gloves. You know exactly what he means by that and it is much shorter than 'reduced tarsa on the foreleg with swollen tibia'. They are very cool flies. Then you have the flies with the big stabby mouthparts, the flies with the massive heads, the flies with the massive humped backs (these are acroceridae and you do get some in the UK and if you ever come across them living I would love to see them) etc.

Apart from destroying the very good world of taxonomy I am busy trying to sort out all of my correspondance ahead of the move to the Darwin Centre. We start packing next week and all of the returned loans I have on my desk need to be reincorporated back into the collection. I have some Brazilian visitors coming over for November and I need to ensure that I have things organised for them, such as passes, keys etc. I am in the habit of delaying and so always get told off for not sorting things out within the correct time period . And I have to sort out some field work that I will be undertaking in October, which will be great!

We are in the SPA this afternoon or the box (the display room) in the new Darwin Centre as we like to call it. I have some flies that I need to cut the wings off so that should appeal to any small child ....

We were in one of the final meetings yesterday trying to sort out the methodology of the sampling strategy and it was amazing that even that still needed lots of work. It is the critical part of the project – without a sound scientific methodology the results could at best be unclear and at worst, meaningless. We were not sure half the time whether it was a language barrier or a scientific one. There will lots of emails of the next couple of months to see how things are going. They got to go on a tour of the new cocoon area of the Darwin Centre before they went to play on the interactive displays. My lovely interpreter squealed at the video I filmed in Thailand and Vietnam. They were taking photos of the video…….

I had to spend the afternoon in the SPA (specimen preparation area inside the cocoon). This is the bit on the tour where a scientist sits in a preparation area and the public can ask them anything about what they are doing. We had the press yesterday. I took along some recuration work that I needed to finish soon, but with one thing and another it is not progressing as fast as I would like. The work is the bee-fly collection and I love bee-flies (Bombyliidae) – amazing flies, small, furry with a long proboscis (mouth part) and they are parasites of ants J. My favourite flies do tend to be the bitey stabby piercing maiming ones – must be something about my personality.  Anyway, the press…well I don’t think that they were particularly interested in my flies (I never understand when people aren’t….) but they liked the building and I think that they understood the concept. Some of the papers had quotes of ‘10 million bugs’ amongst other things……that would be something if that was true but there are only approximately 3 million (true bugs that is). I do believe that a bit of my hand made it into the metro though….I will be in the ‘box’ tomorrow, again recurating bee-flies but this time to the international press so I will try and drum up some more enthusiasm for my little ones.