Thank you for allowing us to take a look at your beetles! Rest assured that they will be treated professionally.
If you are sending them to be identified for your research, please make sure you provide this information.
If you are depositing the beetles into the UF Forest Entomology collection, here is how they may be used :
– If your samples are of high quality (preserved in high-concentration, non-denatured ethanol from the moment of beetle death, and refrigerated) they will be deposited in -80C and in 99% ethanol, which will preserve them for molecular analyses of the beetles or the fungi vectored by the beetles. They may be used by our team or by anyone else in the global bark beetle research community.
– If your samples are of lesser quality but still morphologically intact, they will be used teaching, such as in the Bark Beetle Academy.
Packaging
1) Please put your specimens in ethanol in a plastic, screw-top vial. Do not use snap-top vials (sometimes called Eppendorf tubes) because they invariably pop open in high altitudes and leak. Do not use glass vials – they break.
2) Add a piece of soft napkin or cotton; this prevents the beetles from trashing around and breaking their legs and antennae.
3) The ethanol is important to dehydrate, clean and preserve the specimens. However it is flammable, so you can’t ship it legally. So after the specimens soak and dehydrate, we recommend pouring off about 90% of the ethanol so you can declare the shipment “dry”.
4) Place your vials on a sheet of paper and attach them with a sticky tape.
5) Put the whole thing into a padded envelope.
Shipping
You can send it cheap regular post. Or feel free to use our Fedex account, so you don’t have to pay anything (happily available on request).
Our lab address is:
Jiri Hulcr
UF School of Forest Resources and Conservation
1745 McCarty Drive
Gainesville, FL 32611
USA
Phone: 517-256-1894
Permits
If you are shipping beetles form overseas, we strongly recommend that you attach a document, confirmed by your institution, stating that the beetles were collected with the appropriate permits issued by the country of origin, and that the sample is provided for mutually beneficial research. (Obtaining permits for dead, dry, common pests should not be difficult.) On the US side, you do NOT need a permit to send such specimens into the us (US regulation 7CFR 330.200).
THANK YOU!
