Auckland Museum is home to hundreds of thousands of specimens tucked away in its natural science collection. Museums Aotearoa is calling for the sector to be funded sustainably. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Decades of under-funding are putting at risk an enormous trove of New Zealand’s natural heritage. Jamie Morton reports.
Parasitic wasps and millipedes. Wild plants dating back to Captain James Cook’s voyages. Stuffed birds from the 1850s, chunks of gold, kauri gum and gecko skulls.
In the inner sanctum of Auckland Museum, locked away from exhibition spaces, hundreds of thousands of these natural wonders sit tucked within specialised cabinets and carefully labelled boxes.
Contrary to notions of gloomy, cobwebbed basements, the museum’s store rooms are modern, climate-controlled and frequented by a natural sciences team with select access.
For Otago University’s Associate Professor Nic Rawlence, collections like this aren’t so much a gold mine, but a time machine.
He uses them to travel back hundreds, thousands or millions of years, to when moa roamed forests alive with cacophonous birdsong, or when crocodiles and turtles lurked in prehistoric subtropical swamps.
Without these “ecological genetic treasure troves”, as he calls them, Rawlence simply couldn’t do his job.
“If we are working on species that are still alive now, many are highly endangered and we can’t just look at the living individuals,” he said.
“Museums have all the specimens that allow us to help save species from extinction.”
Now, it seems time is running out for the collections themselves.
The national body representing the country’s museums tells the Herald that, if a new funding model isn’t found within five years, this rich resource could become at risk.
It’s hard to give a precise number of the individual specimens kept in our museums, but it’s vastly more than many of us appreciate.
One of the smallest collections, housed beneath Otago Museum, is thought to comprise about 1.5 million pieces, from spiders kept in ethanol tubes, to the bones of our long-lost adzebill and giant Haast’s eagle.
Cataloguing them all is an exhaustive and expensive task - working out to roughly $20 per item – and they then need to be preserved in temperature and humidity-controlled spaces.
Museums Aotearoa chief executive Adele Fitzpatrick said collections were generally the most costly aspect of any museum, and the least likely to garner funding.
“But it is a public responsibility to look after them.”
Museums drew on a “mixed bag” of financing: Te Papa received tens of millions of dollars from the Government as a baseline, while others, like Auckland Museum, relied on ratepayers and its own revenue.
A number weren’t funded at all, and survived on grants, fundraising and other means.
Now, museums were finding themselves against the wall, with staffing proving the biggest headache.
“Whanganui Museum, for example, used to have a natural sciences curator but no longer do,” Fitzpatrick said.
“Otago Museum has a hiring freeze, their natural science team is down to one staff member, and they haven’t been able to replace their conservation manager.”
There were buildings with leaky roofs.
Parts of Otago Museum were still without sprinkler systems.
At the same time, insurance costs have “sky-rocketed” – some museums reported a three-fold increase – to the extent that some collections weren’t covered.
“This is very risky to collections and to the future of science - and the research that future government policy relies on, from fisheries quotas to climate change legislation.”
The implications stretched beyond our shores.
An earlier report led by University of Auckland marine biologist Dr Wendy Nelson found our taxonomic specimens were of “supreme interest” to international researchers, given New Zealand’s profile as a unique but vastly under-studied global biodiversity hotspot.
Many of our specimens were made available through online biodiversity repositories, drawing millions of page views from around the world each year.
But museums were still facing a backlog of specimens to catalogue in digital databases: a painstaking process that’s been dragging on for decades.
“In an ideal world, high-quality images would be preferable to include, but this has major implications for time budgets and digital storage costs,” Auckland Museum’s Dr Tom Trnsky said.
“While many local and central government agencies and industry use this data - from fisheries, forestry, agriculture, conservation, education to health - no single agency funds it, and neither does the central government.”
One of those users is the Department of Conservation’s Dr Tara Murray.
She turned to museum collections to understand how populations of species had changed - and what needed to be protected.
Museums were one of the places DoC kept “voucher” specimens, or those that could be used to identify a plant or organism at a later date, as it didn’t have a dedicated facility itself.
“We don’t have capacity, the skills, or the physical space to look after vouchers long term or share them with the public, so we need to be able to lodge important material with the major museum collections.”
If collections were being degraded, it’d mean they weren’t safe places for DoC to lodge specimens.
“Important historic records would also be lost; this would be a huge loss for science in New Zealand.”
In some cases, specimens had enormous unforseen value.
Nelson pointed to bird eggs, collected throughout the years, that eventually helped researchers trace the impacts of long-lasting chemicals like DDT.
“Moss specimens that were collected from Antarctica were used to understand when the ozone hole developed – based on the chemicals the mosses produced in response to increasing UV radiation.”
Fitzpatrick blamed the problem on decades of a lack of funding and neglect from successive governments.
Her organisation has been lobbying for the sector to be funded sustainably, and in line with its value to research and what other facilities received.
“We think if a new funding model is not in place in five years, this is when these problems will really start impacting on collections and science research in New Zealand.”
Manatū Taonga’s deputy secretary for policy and sector performance, Emily Fabling, said the ministry was aware museums were increasingly facing financial sustainability issues.
The Government’s key investment in the sector was through Te Papa, she said, but the ministry regularly met with Museums Aotearoa, directors and others to monitor the sector’s health.
Arts, Culture and Heritage Minister Paul Goldsmith was also aware the sector was “unable to do everything they need and want to do right now” - but couldn’t give any assurances.
“No funding decisions have been made as they’ll be part of the Budget 2024 process.”
Rawlence said scientists remained seriously concerned.
In Australia, all major museums were funded by state governments, while his local one had to draw on a “pitifully low” ratepayer base.
Funding museums properly, he said, would allow musems to look after their collections, hire specialist curators, and be “game-changing” for Kiwi science.
“Scientists are not going to be able to answer the big questions that are important to New Zealand, and the ecosystems we care about, unless you’ve got museum collections.”
Jamie Morton is a specialist in science and environmental reporting. He joined the Herald in 2011 and writes about everything from conservation and climate change to natural hazards and new technology.
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