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FeedField Day
Explore life’s creepy, crawly side at this OSU museum open house
Bald eagles, barn owls and great blue herons perch silently on wooden limbs, lurking over imaginary prey. A glass-jar galaxy of timber rattlesnakes, two-lined salamanders and tree frogs stretches over metal shelves a few yards from a leathery walrus hide and a polar-bear head caught mid-growl.
No specimen has crawled, roared, slithered or soared in years, but their stories survive inside Ohio State’s Museum of Biological Diversity, which hosts its annual open house Feb. 9.
“It’s pretty amazing to see what’s in all these collections,” says OSU professor Angelika Nelson.
In her care are roughly 16,500 amphibian, 3,400 reptile, 6,500 mammal and 25,000 bird specimens dating back to 1889. Fish, mollusks, ticks, mites, butterflies and plants are assembled in related departments, and the attached Borror Laboratory of Bioacoustics has archived roughly 40,000 animal sounds. (Its releases include a frog-chorus CD titled “Amphibiance.”)
Home-school students, researchers, wildlife officials and artists can gain special permission to eye extinct species like the ivory-billed woodpecker or study historic ranges—but collections don’t have regular hours or a visitor-friendly layout. Predation-themed open house “Everybody Eats” is the one day a year when they function like a traditional museum. More than 1,000 visitors are expected to wander through collections for an all-ages treasure hunt, explore hands-on displays (like a live insect zoo) and hear stories from experts.
“Many of the collections—especially the herbarium, fishes and tetrapods—focus on specimens collected in Ohio,” Nelson explains, “so these collections provide a repository of species and document biodiversity and rarities in Ohio.”
