There are risks and then there are risks. Imagine having to manage a room full of beetles (yes, insects), in a world-class museum filled with artifacts these beetles could make short work of.
That's just one of the risks the department of ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC has to deal with. I was fortunate to be part of a group treated to a behind the scenes tour there recently.
I've written about art gallery and museum risks in the past, where valuable or priceless items must be protected from fire, water, mold, theft, you name it. But the risks handled by experts at the American Museum of Natural History encompass these and more.
The museum houses one of the largest collections of bird specimens in the world, including skins and skeletons. "Skins" are the bird's skin, carefully removed with feathers, beak and feet intact, and stuffed with cotton. Many of the deceased birds are donated by zoos, preserves and private citizens.
The museum's collection of bird skins goes back to the mid 1800′s and contains some now extinct birds. In fact, I was able to see what an Ivory Billed Woodpecker (possibly not extinct, because of a reported sighting in Louisiana) and a Passenger Pigeon really looked like.
The value of all this is that there are representations of virtually every bird on the planet since the 1800s. What's more, changes in various species—and environmental changes—can be tracked by comparing the birds' physical characteristics and location. Scientists and researchers from all over the world apply to do research there.
And as for the risks, there are about a million of them. They are feathered, delicate and very vulnerable to insects as well as temperature and humidity changes. The risk of the stored bird skins being devoured by insects is solved the old fashioned, low-tech way, with mothballs. Opening a drawer containing of skins in the museum's large storage area provides very strong evidence of the moth balls—grandma's attic never smelled like this!
One risk was surprising. The bones of many birds are cleaned and kept for research—they show the structure of the bird in ways that the outward feathers and skin can't. In the old days, we were told, these bones were painstakingly cleaned by hand and then dried. They ended up a light brown color, because not every bit of muscle and fascia could be removed.
Now, there is a "new" way of cleaning these bones. Again, about as low-tech as it gets, but the method works better than anything else—hence, the large room full of beetles. The beetles' job is to eat any morsel left on the bones, which are cleaned to a pristine white shade.
But because of the obvious risk to the rest of the museum, the beetles have to be contained, using several precautions including a special door. And to make double-sure the insects don't escape, a thick gel-like substance is applied frequently around the door's opening.
This visit to the museum brought home the huge variety of risks that have to be dealt with in the many different types of industries, organizations and locations. Risk managers have to look at the most basic risks—the things that could take down a business—and figure out how best to deal with them.
According to Wikipedia:
The Department of Ornithology maintains one of the largest collections of bird specimens in the world. The research collections of the Department number nearly one million specimens; these include skins, skeletons, alcoholic preparations, eggs, nests, and tissue samples for molecular biochemical studies. A large number of type specimens and rare or extinct species are also found in its collections. The specimens represent all continents and oceans and nearly 99 percent of all species. The Department has an ornithology library for research use and maintains laboratories for specimen preparation, skeletal and anatomical analyses and dissections, and a modern molecular laboratory for DNA sequencing.
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