This article documents the severe and ongoing specimen neglect I witnessed over 12 months working at Florida State Collection of Arthropods. FSCA actively solicits donations, then picks and chooses what specimens to care about based on individuals’ personal favorites. The rest are left to rot.
Please take a look and consider sharing this, it’s extremely important for people (especially in science, taxonomy, natural history, museum curation, etc) to know how and why scientific material is being lost.
Sorry all, I’m extra sad about this today. I keep writing about this situation and deleting it later because I’m still scared they’re going to come after me.
I got fired from FSCA not because of my skill as a curator or the amount of effort I put in (I used to come in on weekends for no extra money just because I enjoyed the work, totally honest) but because I complained anonymously on my twitter about head curator Paul Skelley continuing to hang around in my office and try to talk to me after I had told my boss Felipe Soto-Adames MULTIPLE TIMES that Paul made me very uncomfortable. In a moment of weakness, I complained about it to strangers on the internet because my boss refused to do anything to help me out (he has personally confirmed) out of fear of retaliation/firing. While I was working at FSCA my job was basically covering for Paul, fixing the specimens including holotypes that he and others had neglected for longer than I’ve even been alive. So, yes, having to fix his gross negligence eight hours a day while also having to politely stroke his ego whenever he felt like chatting me up eventually shredded my nerves.
What’s extra pathetic is I still miss that job despite everything. I miss curating and having that goal of fixing up the whole wet collection even though I should not have had to do that and I wasn’t being treated well at all. I learned afterwards that Paul has gone after other young “troublemaking” employees before me and I am only the most recent target.
FSCA has probably burned all evidence that I ever worked there in a ceremonial fire by now but I still think about the place every day. I moved to my current apartment specifically for that job, and I had promised my boss I would stay there permanently even though the pay was barely enough for me to live. I don’t have many job skills. I was just going to stay there and work on my weird shrimp even though there were some jerks around.
I don’t know what to end with, I’m just still sad about this and I’m going to be sad for a while.
If you are in biology or natural history, please don’t forget about Paul Skelley and all the effort he went through just to get back at me personally because I got frustrated at him one time. My life is considerably harder now because I insisted on sticking up for not only myself but for the other people whose thousands of hours of work have rotted into nothing under his watch. Don’t let this guy stay famous for being a great scientist, he is not.
People are asking me how they can help, unfortunately I have limited ideas now. I have let professional organizations know about the situation but I don’t hear back. Individual scientists have told me that they share the undark article, and I think that helps. My former coworkers will not speak to me at all so I have no reason to believe anything has happened. I don’t know what to do except to try and get more eyes on the story so maybe other scientists or journalists can speak out in a way FSCA will actually take seriously.
Nothing is more important to them than their reputation, and right now they’re claiming to be one of the best collections in the world. Here’s what the holotypes were marinating in. You tell me if this is “world class”
Hi everybody look at my Hollow Knight oc. Their name is Raiko and they are a scorpion from a kingdom far from Hallownest. Infodumping (which kind of reads like a little story) and also several more sketches under the cut!!!!
