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November 24, 2025
Did you know that many fascinating wild snake species live within driving distance of downtown Chicago? This past summer, I encountered over 500 snakes in natural areas across the Chicagoland area as part of conservation research efforts by the Chicago Academy of Sciences, with funding from the Morris Animal Foundation’s grassland wildlife health grant. The research team I was a part of is led by Dr. Sacerdote-Velat, who is the Curator of Biology and Herpetology/Vice President of Conservation Sciences at the Chicago Academy of Sciences and has been studying wildlife in the Chicagoland region for over 20 years. As part of her team, it was my job to search natural areas for snakes, briefly capture them to collect data and samples for laboratory analyses, and safely release them back into their wild habitat.(Important note: All handling of snakes was done under an active research permit and done in a manner that was safe and minimally stressful for the snakes, who were safely released where I found them after I collected samples and data)
July 14, 2025
The Life of Viola: What One Turtle Can Teach Us About Saving a Species
One of the hardest parts of wildlife biology is getting to know your research animals and then losing them. This is a tribute to a very special Blanding’s turtle I’ve known for 10 years who recently passed away. Her story reflects some of the joys and heartbreaks of this work, and how deeply we, as scientists, appreciate the animals that help us learn how to conserve nature.
April 15, 2025
These old herbarium labels are hard to read! Can you decipher them?
These labels include scientific names in LATIN, as well as Carl Linnaeus’ classification system using GREEK terms. The plant specimens were collected in Germany around 1900. Rather unique to these labels is the presence of the handwriting used at the time called KURRENT SCRIPT (or Kurrentschrift in GERMAN). It is challenging for us to read now, because it looks so different from our cursive handwriting. It has not been taught in German schools since 1941 so not many German-speaking people can read it either.
April 15, 2025
How Transcription Errors Stand the Test of Time As we in Collections continue to catalog our backlog of botanical specimens, we sometimes stumble on fascinating detours. One of my roles as Collections Technician is to catalog label data strictly as written, i.e., verbatim. Exact transcription is critical not only to honor the original intent of the collector, but also to provide unaltered data for future researchers. Handwritten script is often notoriously difficult to read (whether it be ornate, obscure or just plain messy) and this adds to the challenge of precise transcription. One recent batch of handwritten labels contained two-worded notation with Greek numerical prefixes (tri-, tetra-, penta-). I assumed the terms represented a system, but in the interest of efficiency, I entered the text “verbatim” without investigating the system itself. Eventually I came across the word "Teosandria (XII)" (see red box on label), which did not look Greek to me, and a Google search came up wanting. The word did exist, but only in two 19th-century botanical publications (Brazilian and British), so that's how I initially entered it into our database. As this word appeared on more labels, I wanted to verify it with a substantial reference. I looked more deeply at the first Google search result, the Brazilian Jornal Do Agricultor, (1888) and there it was in print, “Teosandria” (see red arrow).
February 20, 2025
The Importance of Herbarium Records in Environmental Science
As I was starting off my collections internship at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, I was not familiar with just how important herbarium records can be in the field of environmental science. When I think about research in the field of environmental science, my mind goes straight to observational experiments or current environmental samplings. However, after my time at the museum, I will now be thinking about how specimens from the past can help us understand our present. During this internship, I was able to be a part of this process by cataloguing, digitizing, and integrating specimens into our collections, so people could use them for research purposes. Despite just how many herbarium records there are and how useful these records are to illustrate the environment, they are an underused resource in the field. Digitizing these herbarium records have played a huge role in making them more accessible to promote this type of research. Plant specimens act as a great resource to inquire about past environments because plants cannot move. They are exposed directly to environmental changes and it shows in their composition. By studying these plants, we can learn about the environment they lived in and how it changed over time compared to other specimens.
September 12, 2024
Falling Leaves, Falling Feathers: How Birds Create Colors
Fall and the changing colors of leaves are so tied together, that there’s a good chance that the mere word “autumn” likely conjures a palette of orange, reds, and yellows. But the plants aren’t the only ones that shift into different hues as the temperature drops. Birds too will change colors as their now worn-out and damaged summer feathers drop off and are replaced by their (often less colorful) winter plumage. And while the color-changing properties of leaves come from chlorophyll breaking down and revealing the warmer pigments below, things get a little more complicated when we start talking about feathers. For starters, the colors we see when we look at a bird are not all due to pigments. Some colors are due to the microscopic structure of the feather itself, and these structures can even produce a shimmering iridescence. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start with something a little more relatable to us humans.
June 15, 2024
Content Warning: The following blog post contains imagery and descriptions of specimen preparation. Did you know that not only are all of the animals on display at the Nature Museum real, but the steps involved in their preparation have been more or less the same for hundreds of years? Despite changing opinions on chemical preservatives, the process you can see happening today in the Beecher Lab would have happened in much the same way when our earliest specimens were being prepared for the collection.