The unknown planktonic foraminiferal pioneer Henry A. Buckley and his collection at The Natural History Museum, London

Abstract

The Henry Buckley Collection of Planktonic Foraminifera at the Natural History Museum in London (NHMUK) consists of 1665 single-taxon slides housing 23 897 individuals from 203 sites in all the major ocean basins, as well as a vast research library of Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) photomicrographs. Buckley picked the material from the NHMUK Ocean-Bottom Deposit Collection and also from fresh tow samples. However, his collection remains largely unused as he was discouraged by his managers in the Mineralogy Department from working on or publicizing the collection. Nevertheless, Buckley published pioneering papers on isotopic interpretation of oceanographic and climatic change and was one of the first workers to investigate foraminiferal wall structure using the SEM technique. Details of the collection and images of each slide are available via the NHMUK Data Portal (http://dx.doi.org/10.5519/0035055). The Buckley Collection and its associated Ocean-Bottom Deposit Collection have great potential for taxon-specific studies as well as geochemical work, and both collections are available on request

Intraspecific size variation in planktonic foraminifera cannot be consistently predicted by the environment

“…Our PF size dataset was extracted from the recently digitised Henry Buckley Collection of Planktonic Foraminifera (Rillo et al, 2016), held at The Natural History Museum in London (NHMUK). We measured shell area of 3817 individuals from the nine extant PF species most commonly represented in the collection across 53 sites worldwide (Fig.…”

“…Henry Buckley sampled 122 marine sediments from the NHMUK Ocean-Bottom Deposits Collection (OBD) to amass the NHMUK Henry Buckley Collection of Planktonic Foraminifera (Rillo et al, 2016). From these sea-floor sediment samples, we selected those that contained only modern species (Table S2), were collected within the upper 15 cm of sediment, and included at least one of the nine focal species (see below).…”

“…Here we explore for the first time in a global biogeographical scale how population-level PF size relates to local relative abundance and SST. We built a new intraspecific shell size dataset for nine extant PF species, extracted from a recently digitised museum collection (Rillo et al, 2016). Our data comes from seafloor sediments, which averages short-term fluctuations in abundance that potentially blur macroecological patterns (Fenton et al, 2016).…”

Factors affecting consistency and accuracy in identifying modern macroperforate planktonic foraminifera

“…Considering the gradual evolutionary change of many lineages, it is unlikely that taxonomic disagreements will ever be fully resolved. However, if all studies included their taxonomic list and their main references, ideally with associated descriptions or photographs in several relevant orientations, such as is done in Rillo et al (2016), it would make comparisons between studies more robust.…”

Quantifying the Effect of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Calcifying Plankton

“…The wealth of historical collections housed at museums and similar institutions across the world can often be overlooked for cutting edge climate research. At the Natural History Museum, London, the Ocean Bottom Deposits (OBD) collection 4 , which includes vast amounts of material from the HMS Challenger expedition, provides an almost unique source of microfauna to compare pre-industrial oceans to those of today. In this study: "The Challenger Revisited Project", the collection provides a unique opportunity to study the effects of one of the most urgent questions of our time with regards to anthropogenic environmental change: ocean acidification (OA) 5 .…”