While large displays at museums usually get most of the attention, sometimes it's the smallest that are most important.
When you walk into the Natural Selections exhibit at the Royal Alberta Museum, your attention is caught by the immense extinct giant short-faced bear skeleton from the Ice Age. As you walk around the gallery, you'll see progressively smaller entities and objects like seeds and mites and flass. This substance that otherwise looks like sawdust could change the wood industry, thanks to the help of researcher and invertebrate zoology curator Tyler Cobb.
The funny part about flass is that it is actually beetle poop. Cobb has been studying beetles associated with forest fires for about a decade now. He recently published his research detailing how the white-spotted Sawyer beetles actually help forests recover by recycling nutrients back into the earth. This newly discovered fact might influence lumber companies to revise their policy of chopping down all damaged trees after forest fires, turning a short-term loss into possibly a longer-term gain.
Apart from the big bear and bug poop, the fascinating exhibit Natural Selections provides not just a broad insight into the natural history of our province but also gives a tantalizing glimpse of exactly what goes on at the facility or, as Dr. Alwynne Beaudoin describes, “Bringing the backside of the museum to the front side.”
Whereas most people will stare longingly at how the bear dwarfs our modern giants like the polar bear and the grizzly, it's still important to pay attention to the little things like the oribatid mites, which are important to soil and ecosystems in general.
Other sections of the show look at local research into bird, fish and plant species as discovered in our province's caves, wood bogs and other murky spots. Beaudoin spent two days in a backwoods excavation that was slowly filling with water in order to take samples and recreate the last 9,000 years of activity at the spot. If you are as naturally curious as she is then this is the right place for you to spend an afternoon.
Natural Selections runs until Oct. 3. The Royal Alberta Museum is located at 12845 102 Ave. in Edmonton. Call 780-453-9100 or visit www.royalalbertamuseum.ca for more information.
