United States National Tick Collection

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Glen M. Kohls and Robert A. Cooley in front of the Rocky Mountain Laboratory tick collection , 1940

The United States National Tick Collection ( USNTC ) is a zoological research collection of ticks owned by the Smithsonian Institution and on permanent loan from Georgia Southern University in Statesboro , Georgia . The United States National Tick Collection, with more than one million individuals, is probably the largest zoological collection specializing in ticks in the world. Your collection is of great importance for acarology and for research into zoonoses with ticks as vectors .

history

In 1905 the American microbiologist Howard Taylor Ricketts was able to prove that the tick Dermacentor andersoni can transmit the causative agent of Rocky Mountain spotted fever . This clarified the cause of an often fatal illness, which was then believed to be limited to the area around the Bitterroot Valley in southwestern Montana . Ricketts' discovery led to an in-depth study of Montana's tick fauna.

Robert Allen Cooley, 1938

At the time, Robert A. Cooley was director of the Entomology and Zoology Department at Montana State College and a state entomologist in Montana. His duties at the university included curating the zoological collections. Cooley began taxonomic studies on the ticks in the collection to help identify ticks in field research.

In 1926, Cooley traveled to South Africa in an effort to find a way to control Dermacentor andersoni . His goal was to find a parasitic hymenoptera that can be used against the ticks. He collected thousands of ticks on his journey and later began exchanging collection copies with colleagues in South Africa and the UK. In 1931, he resigned from State College and Montana State Entomologist to become chief entomologist at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton , Montana. In this position he was able to concentrate more on the tick collection that he had brought to the laboratory. Their size increased rapidly, as ticks were now the subject of intensive research as disease carriers, and the specimens collected were often passed on to Cooley for his collection.

In 1929, before Cooley moved to the facility, the Rocky Mountain Laboratory hired a second entomologist. Glen M. Kohls was a former student of Cooley and supported him in curating the tick collection. The Second World War brought a new boost to the collection. Several scientists affiliated with the Rocky Mountain Laboratory served in the Allied forces, including in Southeast Asia. Their finds from their areas of application expanded the scope both in terms of the number of copies in the collection and in terms of their origin. Harry Hoogstraal, William L. Jellison , Glen M. Kohls, Cornelius B. Philip and Robert Traub were among the supporters who supported the work of the RML by handing over their own collections . The contacts made during the war later led to international cooperation between the RML and institutions in Africa, Asia and Australia.

Robert A. Cooley in front of the tick collection, 1946

In 1946 Robert A. Cooley retired, and Glen M. Kohls succeeded him as curator of the tick collection. World-class collections were repeatedly given to the RML after the war. In 1949, through his widow, the collection of the late zoologist Paul Schulze with around 140 jars of ticks came to the RML. In the early 1970s, the RML received the collection of the American entomologist Fred C. Bishopp with more than 800 glasses and nine cabinets with microscopic specimens. Such collections usually contained numerous specimens of ticks from around the world, and they were of great historical importance. At the end of the 1950s, Harry Hoogstraal , a civilian researcher with the US Navy in Cairo and the most important acarologist of his time, began a collaboration with researchers from the RML to study ticks around the world. Hoogstraal gradually gave the RML his private collection, including all type copies . This made the Rocky Mountain Laboratory collection the largest collection of ticks in the world.

In 1969 James E. Keirans succeeded Glen M. Kohls. Keirans had previously worked for the Centers for Disease Control in Georgia. In 1983 the Rocky Mountain Laboratory tick collection was donated to the Smithsonian Institution . There it formed the core of the United States Tick Collection under the direction of James E. Keirans. When Harry Hoogstraal died in 1986, the rest of his collection was sent directly to the Smithsonian Institution.

In 1990, the Smithsonian Institution and Georgia Southern University in Statesboro , Georgia signed an agreement that gave the United States National Tick Collection on permanent loan to the University's Institute of Arthropods and Parasitology. James E. Keirans remained the curator until 2005. Like the second curator, he was paid from the university's budget. The university also provided the necessary rooms and their equipment and, in return, was able to take over a world-class research facility. Lorenza Beati has been the curator of the collection since 2011 .

scope

The United States National Tick Collection differs from the United States National Parasite Collection , founded in 1892 and housed in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC since 2014, in that it is restricted to ticks. It has a collection of more than a million ticks in all stages of development. The collection includes more than 125,000 inventory items, which in individual cases can contain hundreds of ticks. There are specimens of almost all of the more than 900 species of tick described, including more than 300 types or more than a quarter of the holotypes in collections worldwide. The United States National Tick Collection is considered to be larger than all other tick collections in the world combined.

The USNTC has a specialist scientific library with more than 50,000 articles and monographs on ticks and the diseases they transmit. Its core is the academic legacy of Harry Hoogstraal, who began early on to have specialist literature translated into Russian or Chinese.

The entire collection was already recorded in databases in the 1980s and made accessible via the computer system of the Smithsonian Institution. Even then it was possible to search for species , individual collections, inventory numbers, hosts of the ticks or their geographic origin , for example .

meaning

The collection copies serve as a reference for identifying ticks and as a basis for researching the biological systematics of ticks. The USNTC is of great importance in the control of tick-borne diseases in humans or their pets. In addition to being the vector of zoonoses and infectious diseases of domestic and farm animals, ticks cause damage in agriculture by weakening farm animals through blood loss, damaging their udders and skins and transmitting toxins . The USNTC has always made ticks from around the world the subject of its collection and research.

While the collections used to focus on the identification of ticks according to morphological criteria and their classification in the biological system , modern methods such as DNA analysis are in the foreground today. Current issues concern biogeography , phylogenetics and the coevolution of parasites and hosts, while studies on the function of ticks as vectors for pathogens are still a focus of work. After the discovery of Borrelia burgdorferi , the causative agent of Lyme borreliosis , an examination of older collection copies of the United States National Tick Collection showed that the pathogen has been present in the tick population for decades and is spreading. While earlier research relied on direct observations of ticks on their hosts, today it is possible to examine the intestinal contents of decades-old collection specimens and to determine the host of a tick by means of a DNA analysis. Many research projects are initiated by employees of the United States National Tick Collection.

The collection is also a service provider to the international community of researchers. One of their everyday tasks is identifying ticks, which doctors, veterinarians, biologists, customs officers and interested laypeople from around the world send to the USNTC for identification. Such mailings are identified and included in the collection; the senders receive the inventory number of the collection in addition to the identification, which they can state in a scientific publication. This creates a detailed picture of the distribution and frequency of individual tick species.

literature

  • Lance A. Durden, James E. Keirans, and James H. Oliver, Jr .: The US National Tick Collection: A Vital Resource for Systematics and Human and Animal Welfare. In: American Entomologist 1996, Vol. 42, No. 4, pp. 239-243, doi : 10.1093 / ae / 42.4.239 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Lance A. Durden, James E. Keirans and James H. Oliver, Jr .: The US National Tick Collection, p. 240.
  2. ↑ Glen M. Kohls: Robert Allen Cooley 1873-1968 . In: Journal of Economic Entomology 1969, Volume 62, No. 4, p. 972, doi : 10.1093 / jee / 62.4.972 .
  3. ↑ Lance A. Durden, James E. Keirans and James H. Oliver, Jr .: The US National Tick Collection, pp. 240-241.
  4. ↑ a b c Lance A. Durden, James E. Keirans and James H. Oliver, Jr .: The US National Tick Collection, p. 241.
  5. ↑ a b The US National Tick Collection (USNTC) ( Memento of the original dated November 2, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Georgia Southern University website, accessed December 6, 2017. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / cosm.georgiasouthern.edu
  6. ↑ a b Lance A. Durden, James E. Keirans and James H. Oliver, Jr .: The US National Tick Collection, p. 239.
  7. ↑ a b Lance A. Durden, James E. Keirans and James H. Oliver, Jr .: The US National Tick Collection, p. 242.
  8. ↑ James E. Keirans and Carleton M. Clifford: A Checklist of Types of Ixodoidea (Acari) in the Collection of the Rocky Mountain Laboratories. In: Journal of Medical Entomology 1984, Volume 21, No. 3, pp. 310-320, doi : 10.1093 / jmedent / 21.3.310 .
  9. ↑ David H. Persing et al .: Detection of Borrelia burgdorferi DNA in Museum Specimens of Ixodes dammini Ticks . In: Science 1990, Volume 249, No. 4975, pp. 1420-1423, doi : 10.1126 / science.2402635 .
  10. ↑ Jerzy Tobolewski et al .: Detection and Identification of Mammalian DNA from the Gut of Museum Specimens of Ticks. In: Journal of Medical Entomology 1992, Volume 29, No. 6, pp. 1049-1051, doi : 10.1093 / jmedent / 29.6.1049 .


Coordinates: 32 ° 25 '10 "  N , 81 ° 46' 36.1"  W.