Invertebrate Zoology

Curator: Katja Seltmann

The UCSB Invertebrate Zoology collection began as a student teaching collection for an entomology class in the 1950s. In 1960, Dr. Adrian Wenner arrived at UCSB and added a small personal collection of families not represented in the collection. The collection continues to grow through voluntary donations of arthropods collected by students for class projects, accessions from the UCSB Natural Reserve System, and research projects at UCSB and the Cheadle Center Ecological Restoration. The majority of the specimens are insects from UC Santa Barbara and surrounding area and the collection strength is in Hymenoptera.

Data and images from the collection are available via our online Symbiota data management system (Ecdysis) and shared broadly with Global Biodiversity Information Facility and iDigBio.