Invertebrate Zoology

Curator: Katja Seltmann

The arthropod collection began as a student teaching collection for the entomology class in the 1950s. In 1960, Dr. Adrian Wenner arrived at UCSB and added a small personal collection of families not represented in the collection. The collection continues to grow through the decades by voluntary donations of arthropods collected by students for their class projects, accessions from the UCSB Natural Reserve System, and through arthropod monitoring projects from the Cheadle Center Ecological Restoration program. Because of the origin of this collection, the majority of the specimens are from UCSB Santa Barbara and surrounding area.

Most specimens are identified only to the family level. The collection has not been formally curated, and most specimens have minimal labeling.