A Day at the Museum

Post date: Apr 28, 2020 9:28:27 PM

Hi everyone! I am Kelsey, one of the students of the Plankton Hui here to write about another great experience of the semester. We were given the opportunity to volunteer with the vertebrate (Molly Hagemann) and marine invertebrate (Holly Bollick) curators of Bishop Museum. This was a new experience for me especially since I haven’t been to the museum since elementary school. Between college, Kilo ʻĀina, and Bishop Museum, I feel like I had a very engaging and informative Spring semester.

We would meet once or twice a week from early February until around mid-March due to COVID-19 cancelations. Many of the organisms we worked with have once been native to Hawaii but are now extinct. Tasks included working in the library (filing and organizing research papers), sorting through marine organisms retrieved from an ARMS (Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structure) to completing an inventory of bird bones in the collection. Many of these bones were from the Moa Nalo, which is a large group of flightless birds endemic to Hawaii that became extinct. Hopefully we will be able to resume this soon and we can see what happens next.

- Kelsey

Aloha everyone! I am Kasey, a student from the University of Hawaii at Manoa studying Natural Resources and Environmental Management (NREM). I had the chance to work with the Molly H. and Holly B., the curators of Bishop Museums of the vertebrate and marine invertebrate collections. This internship has given me exposure to different career fields related to NREM. During this internship, I gained the skills to use Microsoft Access, looking through and organizing marine organisms retrieved from an Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structure (ARMS), and taking inventory of bird bones in the vertebrate collection. We met one to two times a week during February and March but had to postpone our internship due to COVID-19. Hopefully, this internship continues after this situation passes.

- Kasey