Entomologist Emily Althoff walks ahead of me through the Enns Entomology Museum at the University of Missouri, which appears to simply be a large room filled with hundreds of filing cabinets.
“We actually have one of the largest university collections in the US … I think there’s like maybe two that might be larger?” Althoff said. “But it’s huge. We have 7 million specimens.”
Althoff is an urban entomologist for MU Extension and Lincoln University, and today, we’re talking about the Asian needle ant, an invasive species that has recently been identified in Missouri.
“I started tracking it on iNaturalist to see, ‘Okay, where is this thing and is it close to Missouri?'” Althoff said. “And then once we thought that we might have it, I came in here to compare samples — and let me see if we can find it.”…