Why I collect

Aside from pins and badges, I have a fetish for collecting dead creatures. Arthropods, mainly, and the odd vertebrate, stink though they may. I love being able to examine them up close, at all angles, an otherwise impossible task were they alive. Likewise with the exuviae, my containers of exoskeletons and skins, and zip-lock pouches of feathers.

Just before Christmas, I ordered some entomological supplies from Australia. This was long overdue; I should have acquired them when I still the net-swinging, butterfly-sweeping pre-teen. Or at least after my stint with NHM. Instead most of my specimens were left in vials, all dried up, some diptera headless, some hemiptera legless, and some had succumbed to the humidity and became enveloped in blobs of mould – these were usually promptly disposed of in the bin.

After recently depositing an unidentified species of tingid bug with the Raffles Museum and being given the opportunity to pierce a minuten through its scutellum, a brilliant moment of NHM entom-ness struck, and it struck hard. Then I knew that I could hold off starting a proper collection no longer.

I think it’s human nature to want to collect stuff, just that perhaps not that many are into chitinous shells of nature, which is unfortunate. In Singapore, outside the biodiversity establishments, this pastime probably died with the departure of the British.

Whatever it is, it may be that we are deeply intriged by its intrinsic interestingness, its aesthetics, or we simply derive joy in ownership, or we may believe that it holds some potential value. To me, my collections speak to me in a temporal sense: It was [alive], it is [dead], and will continue to be [dead, yet existing]. And, like the photographs I take, I am attached to them through figments of my memory. I remember where I collected them (or how they came to me), with who, and how. Each has a story, and not just physiological ones!

My colleagues have been presenting me with ‘gifts’. The latest are a dead 178cm-long Oriental whip snake (it’s freakin’ long) and a juvenile spotted house gecko. As an experiment, I’ve arranged them in tupperware boxes ventilated with holes and buried them behind the office where ants abound. I’ll give them a while to decompose, and we’ll see what happens.