Best Practice - Deciding What to Catalog

Multiple Individuals

Embryos and parasites may be treated as parts of the host organism. Ideally, embryos should be treated as separate cataloged items because they may have, or they may acquire, attributes distinct from those of their mothers. Nevertheless it is often practical to consider them as parts of the mother until such time as they do acquire separate attributes. Similarly, parasites have been recorded as parts of their hosts until such time as they might be worked into a separate parasite collection.

What we choose to name as a part depends on what we define as a part, and while this is often obvious (e.g., “whole organism”), organisms become separated into parts in ways both standardized and not. Thus, it is difficult to standardize vocabulary for every fragment worthy of preservation.

Lots

Several discipline catalog lots, or multiple individuals in some (usually arbitrary, often presumed) relationship, under one catalog number. This is often a useful step when collections result in more material than can be handled at a time (“a bucket of bugs from a light trap on a night”), but should never be considered Research Grade, and should never be analyzed nor cited. Instead, recatalog individuals (or the item of scientific interest) and link them back to the source lot via Identifiers. This can often be arranged as part of a Loan process.

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