One of the best things about Melbourne is the cool mix of people who make it such an awesome place to live. There are Melburnians who take people around on tours, spend all day in an underground cheese cave or even spend their days interpreting Auslan. Find out the things you'll only know if... from each of our interviews so far.
Bugs aren’t easy to love. “Creepy” seems to be a common descriptor when we’re talking about things that like to crawl around. But it’s this stereotype that Melbourne Museum curator Dr Ken Walker is trying to change. You could say he’s doing a bit of good PR for the amazing insects and bugs that he encounters through his work in the entomology department of the museum.
Here are a few things you only know if you’re an entomologist at Melbourne Museum.
The museum collection is enormous
"We’ve got about 2 million specimens just in the insect collection (there’s about 16 million specimens in the entire museum). These include both Australian and overseas species. To me, the collection is like a large reference library, a large reference book. I’ve been at the museum for more than 40 years and it’s been the collection that has kept me there. It’s allowed me to do wonderful research. I’m what they call a taxonomist, which means that I name new species. So I have the privilege of being paid to go out and to swing a net on varying trees and collect bees, in particular, and come back and name them."
There’s still so much to learn about Australian insects
“Take, for example, birds. There are about 800 species of birds in Australia. It’s not too hard for you to get a handle on all of those. But with insects, there could be 500,000 species in Australia. Every day I see something new that I’ve never seen before or I discover some new aspect about the biology, ecology or reproduction of a species. It’s just an endless trove of information. I think that’s what attracts me [to the subject] and it has kept me going.”
“Being a museum curator, I work with dead animals, because they’re all dead at the museum. And I always say that I work in an insect morgue and my job is to be the voice of those insects. So that’s the way that I kind of view my work. It’s a great job.”
Insects are animals too!
“One of the things I often say is that people naturally have empathy for fury, cuddly animals. You’ve also got a lot of people saying that there are animals and insects – but insects are animals! So I try to engender some kind of empathy, whether it be for a spider or a snail or a termite. That’s what I try to do. And once you begin to get that little bit of empathy, then it becomes self-evident that conservation, preservation and habitat are all part of being able to keep these animals alive. So I do feel like I have to get out there and defend [them].”
“I work in an insect morgue and my job is to be the voice of those insects.”
Insects are very important to our ecosystem
“There was a great saying by a famous biologist out of Harvard, E. O. Wilson: “These are the little things that run the world.” And they are! You think about the decomposers, the pollinators… without them, life would be extremely difficult and very different without the invertebrates. But most people have some kind of dislike for them. They see them only as pests. Only one per cent of all the insects are pests, 99 per cent are good, either helping us or being part of the environment, part of the ecosystems.”
All entomologists have a favourite bug
“[Mine is] in the entomology collection. It’s a butterfly from Tibet called the Bhutan glory. It’s a magnificent coloured butterfly with long tails out the back. The thing I like about this (because I looked up its biology) is because it lives so high in snow-covered fields, it takes seven years for the caterpillar to go from egg to adult. Now what happens is, for each year, for about one month, it’s warm enough where the snow is gone and the plants come out and the caterpillar comes out and it goes chew chew chew. And then all of a sudden it has to go back to sleep. So it has literally one month for seven years where it’s able to eat and that. Then it’s only got about two weeks where it can fly around, mate and lay eggs and start that whole process again. It’s a magnificently large butterfly and I just think what it’s got to go through, to go through its natural life cycle is incredible. It’s got my admiration.”
Treasures of the Natural World is a must-see exhibit
“The Natural History Museum, which has about 18 million specimens in London, chose 200 specimens and artefacts [to bring to Melbourne] that really show you the moments in time. Some of these specimens and the people involved gave us our concepts of science in the western world. For example, [there are] specimens collected by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. I mean, the change in the way we thought about how animals came about pre and post Darwin and Wallace, from evolution to natural selection, it just changed the way we see the world. And these are the specimens collected by Alfred Russell Wallace and by Charles Darwin – it’s crazy! There’s actually a label [in the exhibit] on one of the birds, one of the Galapagos finches. And it’s got ‘C Darwin Esq.’ written on it. To me, that’s just a huge hook to be able to see that.”
You have to see the sabre tooth tiger IRL
“It’s the only full sabre tooth tiger skeleton in Australia. The back half of the animal looks normal. But the front half is just super involved, super oversized, massive legs, massive shoulder blades and if you look at the neck vertebrae, the very first one’s got big wings. That’s all to do with muscle attachment. So these animals obviously came along and they wrestled their prey which were bison and things like that. To see the whole animal is just great.”
The Melbourne Museum is currently closed during Melbourne's sixth lockdown. When it reopens, make a beeline to the Treasures of the Natural World exhibit.
