The Mysterious Biodiversity in Alfred Wallace’s Collectio

KOMPAS/LUKI AULIA

A 3.6-meter python skin is displayed as part of the Linnean Society\'s collection. British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace contributed the python skin, which was added to the collection in 1958, from Ambon. Wallace trapped, killed and skinned the python when it crawled onto the roof of the house he was renting, an account that appears in Wallace’s seminal work, The Malay Archipelago.

In his eight years of exploring the Indonesian archipelago, renowned British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace and his assistants collected around 128,000 animal specimens, most of which were butterflies, insects and birds. Almost all of the preserved specimens in Wallace’s collection are stored in botanical gardens and museums in the United Kingdom and several other countries. They are waiting to be explored further.

Wallace’s private collection is now stored in museums and botanical gardens in the United Kingdom, including the Natural History Museum, the British Museum, the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and the British Library. Wallace’s family donated the collection to these institutions after his death. Some were donated by private collectors who had purchased “duplicates” of Wallace’s collected specimens from his agent Samuel Stevens. The museums also routinely purchase “duplicates” of Wallace’s collected specimens, like what the Natural History Museum (NHM) did between 1857 and 1865.

UK biologist and historian George Beccaloni, who has studied Wallace in the last 17 years, estimated that Wallace had collected 5,000 new animal specimens and a number of ferns from the archipelago. Wallace personally kept 18 percent of the 128,000 specimens that he had collected during his travels. This includes 3,000 skin specimens of 1,000 avian species, along with 20,000 specimens of beetles and butterflies from 7,000 species. In 1873, Wallace sold his collection of bird specimens to the NHM.

After his journey through the archipelago, Wallace reviewed the best among his collection to gain a clearer picture of the region’s evolution and biogeography processes. He then published 21 scientific articles discussing 295 new species (120 types of butterflies, 70 types of beetles and 105 types of birds). Other naturalists followed in Wallace’s footsteps, publishing a total of 350 papers. The next generation of naturalists successfully identified 4,700 new species in Wallace’s collection. Some 250 of these species were named either wallacii or wallacei.

Efforts to unravel the mysteries and identify specimens in Wallace’s collection still go on today, either due to incomplete information or conditions in certain specimens, or due to the lack of experts with competence to identify the specimens. Royal Botanic Gardens Kew’s Asian Research Leader Andre Schuiteman said that certain plant specimens were still kept in cool-aired herbariums and remained unidentified due to lack of experts of those specimens.

“Specimens can be stored up to 100 years. We have dried specimens dating back to the 1800s here. As long as they stay dry and the herbarium’s temperature is kept under 20 degrees Celsius, they will be preserved. We also have Wallace’s collection of ferns and orchids that went into the herbarium in 1857,” Schuiteman said.

At first, Wallace only labeled his donated plants with general place names, such as Borneo. Nowadays, the specimens have additional information on the specific place where it had been acquired, including the exact coordinates and photographs of the plant in its original environment. Currently, Kew’s herbarium, which was established in 1872, has seven million plant specimens, the

oldest of which being a tea specimen from India’s Assam region. Schuiteman said that Kew also had a seed bank containing hibernated live seeds that could be revived in the future.

No specimen in Kew is not under continuous exploration by scientists. Thanks to technological advancements, data on Kew’s vast collection is now available on its official website. The goal is to allow the general public to access and use the data for scientific development and to ensure the future of biodiversity.

NHM head of science policy and communication John Jackson said that the museum’s collection of six million plants, the oldest of which dates back to the 1650s, was a treasure trove for continuous scientific research and industrial needs. By studying the museum’s collection, it is hoped that scientists can study the environments of the past and of today to provide the best recommendations for the future. “In order to create proper environmental policies for the future, we need complete information of the past,” Jackson said.

Preventing extinction

Specimens will be of no use if only collected and stored, including at botanical gardens, such as the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) in Scotland. RBGE tropical forest botanist and Sapotaceae expert Peter Wilkie said that botanic gardens should strive to regrow plants once the identification process was completed. However, Peter acknowledged that the identification process on certain plants was difficult. If there is no competent experts on certain plants, the plants would be stored. The oldest plant in RBGE’s herbarium dates back to 1697.

As part of its conservation efforts, RBGE has successfully grown two Sumatran Rafflesia arnoldii flowers since 2015. RBGE glasshouse supervisor Louise Galloway said that the Rafflesia arnoldii grew three centimeters every 24 hours RBGE’s “Tropical Lowlands” glasshouse. The glasshouse’s temperature ranges between 19 degrees Celsius at night and 21-25 degrees Celsius at daytime. Special care is taken as the plant was included in the prone category in International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Plants in 1997.

“Our glasshouse has 440 flora species from Indonesia. We strive to recreate the plants’ original environments to help them regrow. However, there are many unidentified species in our collection,” Peter said.

In its efforts to preserve Indonesian plants, RBGE collaborates with the Indonesian Institute of Sciences’ (LIPI) center of botanic research. LIPI botanist Marlina Ardiyani said that LIPI and RBGE had a long history of scientific collaboration, including on procuring new specimens, collaborative projects, identification of new species and human resource development.

British Council Indonesia director Paul Smith said that Wallace’s celebrated book “The Malay Archipelago” perfectly captured Indonesia’s wealth of natural resources, cultures, religions and ethnicities. His works, along with the concept of the Wallace region, is a collective legacy of Indonesia and the United Kingdom. Smith said that the British Council was committed to encourage Indonesians’ active participation in nature conservation and science development in the Wallacea region.

“Together with our Indonesian and British partners, we wish to inspire Indonesians to recognize the importance of science and of safeguarding Nusantara’s diversity,” Smith said.