Auckland Museum's insect collection commenced soon after the Museum was
founded in 1852.
The collection contains comprehensive collections of most insect types as well as other terrestrial and freshwater invertebrates (worms, spiders and their relatives, millipedes and centipedes, some isopods and amphipods).
The geographical coverage of these collections is New Zealand-wide, but is concentrated on northern New Zealand and its offshore islands, particularly the Three Kings, Great Barrier, Cuvier and the Aldermen Is. There are also good collections of some groups from the South Island, the Chathams and subantarctic islands. The collection contains some Pacific material and a collection of Australian beetles.
Key specimens include:
- NZ beetles, moths and parasitic wasps
- Antarctic and subantarctic springtails
- The C.E. Clarke collection of NZ beetles and moths (shared with the Natural History Museum, London)
- Thomas Broun's historic collection of foreign beetles.
There are about 300,000 specimens and the collection grows by about 5,000 per year. Information on individual specimens is currently being entered on a computer database with all of the 300 primary types and about half of the pinned New Zealand collection and entered so far.
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Natural Science Database
Collection records for a small selection of specimens are available for searching the entomology records currently available .
They include all primary types of all terrestrial invertebrate groups, and all Hemiptera and Lepidoptera. Other groups will be added as data are checked.
The database is intended for scientific and academic research so searching must be done on scientific names from family level or lower in the Linnaean classification hierarchy. It’s not possible to use common names e.g., cave weta, huhu beetle, butterfly.
The advanced search function lets you search on type status, geographical locality, collector, date etc. |
Staff and research interests
Curator:
John Early - Systematics of parasitic Hymenoptera; NZ insect fauna; fauna of offshore islands.
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