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It’s been a while since we got backstage at the California Academy of Sciences. Last Friday evening was Curators’ Night, with various entomologists, anthropologists, and others available to discuss their work, plus guided tours of the collections. The museum put on a nice spread, too, including mysterious blue cocktails (alas, not Romulan Ale.) 

So Ron and I got to see the entomology vault, which reeked of mothballs, and the mammalogy/ornithology collection. Jewel-like buprestid beetles, dazzling Madagascar sunset moths, Galapagos finches collected in 1905 by the expedition that returned to find the Academy in ruins, walrus bacula (penis bones) like the one Representative Don Young (R-Alaska) once brandished at a witness during a Congressional hearing. In entomology we were shown a specimen tray of butterflies that dermestid beetles had attacked and reduced to a drift of dust. Later came the dermestids at work, reducing bird and mammal remains to bone. The dermestid room wasn’t quite as malodorous as we expected. “It doesn’t bother me anymore,” said Moe Flannery, our guide. “I just got used to it.” 

The insect collection alone, we were told, has 17.5 million pinned specimens and 3 million in alcohol, including 400,000 species of beetles alone. (Someone once asked the cranky Marxist biologist J. B. S. Haldane what attributes of God could be deduced from nature. “An inordinate fondness for beetles,” said Haldane.”) We learned about the Schmidt Sting Pain index. The bullet ant rates a maximum of 4 points (“Pure, intense, brilliant pain”), the Pepsis wasp or tarantula hawk 3 (“Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric”), honey bees a mere 2 (“Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.”) My hat is off to Justin Schmidt, who claims to have experienced the effects of the majority of species of stinging bees, wasps, and ants. 

The mothball-free mammal and bird shelves hold 28,000 mammal specimens, 96,000 bird skins, and 11,000 eggs and nests. They’re saving space for research associate Ray Bandar’s private collection of 6000 skulls, incorporating the world’s largest assemblage of California sea lion skulls, all still at his home. Our guide, Moe Flannery, told us sharks don’t like sea otters (too much hair) but relish young elephant seals (“They’re like marshmallows.”) 

Flannery explained that some specimens, like the Darwin’s finches, are too precious to travel. Recently a scientist who was studying bird diseases was allowed to take tiny samples from bird pox lesions on the finches’ feet. Analysis of the viral DNA in the lesions allowed her to pinpoint the arrival of the disease in the Galapagos Islands to 1878. It was probably introduced by a captive canary. How’s that for forensics? 

Downstairs, we talked to marine biologist Rich Mooi, with whom I had corresponded a few years back about a rare Bay-endemic crustacean called Lightiella serendipita. The creature, which is among the most primitive living crustaceans and looks like something from the Burgess Shale, was caught off the Richmond shore decades ago. Mooi had hoped it would turn up again during the Academy’s SF Bay:2K survey at the turn of the millenium, but no such luck. Its habitat may have been buried by river-borne sediment. 

Mooi was standing behind a card table covered with sand dollars of various shapes: all flat, some with internal slits, others with flanged edges. I asked him what that was about. It turned out to be a matter of hydrodynamics. The slits (lunules) and flanges (ambital notches) act as spoilers, keeping the bottom-dwelling creatures from being swept away by currents. Biologist Malcolm Tedford used wind tunnel tests to establish this in the early 1980s. In some species, current pressure is relieved by concave drainage channels that lead into the lunules. Pretty elegant. 

A few years ago I met a vendor at the Ashby flea market who was selling, along with the usual African beads and masks, necklaces of fossilized sea urchins. These were more inflated, more or less biscuit-like, than Mooi’s specimens, and lacked the holes. “They find them in the desert,” he explained—in Mali, I think, although it may have been Niger. Millions of years ago a tropical seaway cut across what’s now the Sahara Desert. Things change. 

Another change: the curators’ offices, which we walked through to get to the collection vaults, lack the accretion of Far Side cartoons and other newspaper clippings that I recall from open-house tours in the Academys’ old building. It may take decades to build up another such layer.s