NEWS & OBSERVER (Raleigh, N Carolina) 28 March 11 If it ever slithered in N.C., it's here (Josh Shaffer)

Raleigh: Every creature that ever crawled, hopped or oozed across North Carolina, from the hellbender salamander to the southern hognose snake to the barnacle pulled from the hide of a beached whale, can be found floating in jugs of ethanol in west Raleigh, tended by a team of obsessive Ph.D.s.

This gallery of slippery beasts is housed in a plain, box-shaped laboratory off Reedy Creek Road, where more than 2 million turtles, snakes, sharks, snails, octopi, clams and fish get tagged and catalogued like volumes in an aquatic library - hidden a safe distance from civilization should the highly flammable ethanol, uh, explode.

Some of the specimens date to the 1890s, when British zoologist brothers C.S. and H.H. Brimley were building the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences. Inside one of the jugs, you can still see a Gulf Coast toad snared in 1896 - slightly browned but otherwise a perfect picture of the 19th-century amphibian.

But over the century, the museum has carefully collected every species native to the state, not to mention a torrent of new beasts only recently discovered and still unnamed, such as the finger-length salamanders resting in what could pass for an olive jar.

Together, they create a snapshot of the state's critter population - a web-footed, gill-breathing census. Those who keep the jugs humbly ask that your legislators think of them at budget time.

"Care and feeding is very simple," said Wayne Starnes, the museum's curator of fishes and lab director, opening a refrigerator-size tank, reaching a gloved hand into the ethanol. "There's a baby great white in there. There's a spotted eagle ray right here."

The research laboratory receives a dizzying number of specimens, from the rattlesnake flattened in Pender County to entire university collections being discarded.

Not long ago, the museum inherited the Herbert D. Athearn collection of mollusks - the largest of its kind in the world. Before he died, Athearn worked for a stove company and then the U.S. Postal Service.

But through every other waking moment of his life, he was gathering freshwater clams and snails - the sort of avid hobbyist well loved and understood by the rubber-glove-wearing denizens on Reedy Creek Road.

Arthur Bogan, curator of aquatic invertebrates, carted Athearn's treasures to Raleigh in a pickup and a U-Haul, where they are still being counted. So far, roughly halfway through the collection, the count comes to 250,000. "Almost killed me," Bogan sighed.

This isn't just a hall full of freaks in jars, a place to see the ghostly eyes and wide-open mouths of long-departed creepy crawlies.

From these data, you can tell what lived where and when, and make a good guess as to why it no longer lives there.

"Let's look at coral snakes," herpetologist Bryan Stuart said.

He shows off a jar full of 25 of them, coiled on top of each other. Secretive and venomous, corals by the dozen could be found across the North Carolina Sandhills until 1960, when the records suddenly stop. Now, they come no farther north than Carolina Beach.

So what happened? Did the climate change? Did Fort Bragg get too loud? Did the snakes retire to the coast? Any scientist with a theory could tap into this jar for data.

Questions welcome

These aisles of floating biology also make for a boffo field trip.

"The people who ask great questions," Bogan said, "are the second- and third-graders who haven't 'learned' it's not cool to ask questions."

Even the smallest life form yearns for some recognition, some small reminder that it existed, some evidence that it swam through waterways that never knew modern paper mills, or inched across forests uncut by asphalt.

In this laboratory, life gets bottled up and saved simply because it is life. You can take it out and look at it, touch it, measure it, find out what it liked it to eat, how it chose to reproduce, what it has to say about its short stay on this part of the planet.
If it ever slithered in N.C., it's here

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• SC Press: If it ever slithered in N.C... - W von Papineäu, Wed Mar 30 10:47:55 2011