An animal exodus

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1:10The spectacular central hall of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington in London. This museum is one of the UK's most celebrated treasures. This building is full of natural wonders. We didn't bump into the world-famous naturalist David Attenborough. This is his audio guide to the museum. Since its opening in 1881, the museum's collections have grown to around 80 million specimens. Each of them enables us to understand the natural world, the way it began, how it developed and what its future may be. Over 7 million people visit from all over the world. every year. Above your head in the vast arched ceiling, elegant paintings in red, gold and green depict a wide variety of plants from across the globe.

2:09As you look around, you will see that the building is enlivened by sculptures of all kinds of animals, some living, some prehistoric, from imposing feline gargoyles on the roof to mischievous monkeys clambering up the pillars. But there's another part of the museum, a separate building that the public doesn't see. It's just as important. It's the Natural History Museum's store, hidden to protect the collection. This is a research collection. It is unique in its form and its function, it's a resource for the entire global scientific community. There's nothing to identify this industrial building on a quiet side street.

2:55You could walk straight past and never guess, but step through an unmarked door and then an airlock and you're met by a truly astonishing sight. A vast space, absolutely full of all creatures, great and small. One of the big misconceptions I think that people have about museum collections in storage is that they're just things waiting to go on display. You know, those poor museums don't have space for that stuff in the galleries. It's not about that. The collections behind the scenes in inverted commas are here for research. That's what they're all about. Principal curator of mammals, Richard Sabin, is part of a team preparing to move one of the greatest scientific collections ever assembled.

3:41Tens of millions of specimens, some microscopic, others bigger than buses fragile, precious even extinct examples from every corner of the globe some are millions of years old they'll be going to a new state-of-the-art store and research centre near Reading a town outside London This is something that you can only do with research collections like this once, possibly if you're crazy twice in a lifetime that this facility is old, it's crumbling, it's deteriorating and it's not suitable, it's not fit for purpose. I am Stephen Coates and for the documentary from the BBC World Service we've been to visit the store as preparations get underway.

4:29Here we go.

4:34My name's Geoff Stryker. I'm an evolutionary biologist. I look after the museum's very large collection of amphibian and reptile specimens. So these are animals like frogs and snakes, toads, lizards, crocodilians. We've got shelves with hundreds of specimens. So we've got the storks there, and on our other side we have some very colourful tropical birds. They're amazingly lifelike. Some of them even seem to be looking back at us with bright eyes. Watch your step. We've got some warning tape as we go through this narrow area around a very large leatherback sea turtle, the world's largest living turtle.

5:21We begin the process really with looking at everything that we have, opening every cupboard, opening every drawer to see what state everything is currently in. Maggie White is the collection's Move Preparation Manager, organising a team of around 50 specialists, conservators, engineers, project managers and logistics experts who work alongside the curators. So looking at a physical condition of something like you would when you move house, thinking, does that thing have a crack in it? Does it need to be wrapped really, really carefully before we can put it in a box? And a lot of our collections are going into fluid to be preserved.

6:01So we have a lot of things in jars. The last time these specimens were moved was 30 years ago, when they arrived in the current store. Technology has moved on since then. The type of trucks that we use have really, really high suspension. So if you're driving down the motorway and you hit a bump, that bump isn't going to impact the cargo and that truck can be environmentally conditioned. So if we need to, we can also have lorries that are temperature controlled throughout the moves for them going into their new home in Reading. And now we've come to the part of the collection that I help look after.

6:38So the monitor lizard in front of me is probably about a metre and a half in length. Look down here. This is the original display plaque. So you can see that it says water monitor from Kedah in the Malay Peninsula, 1895. And so that tells me that this would have been one of our display specimens in South Kensington shortly after it opened in the late 1800s. This specimen was sitting there and it is still here with us today and still educating people about the natural world. You can see that our conservators have carefully tied the tail down with some archival grade string. Every piece of string, paper, foam wrapping, everything that touches the animals should be archival grade.

7:25That means it's chemically stable and won't spoil the specimens. Specialist teams use all these things to make repairs. Stretching tissue over delicate animal skin before packing up the specimens for travel. Every single item is labelled by barcode with its type, origin and when it was collected. Digitisation's been at the fore of what we've been doing with the collections. Digital systems, but also digital photography and 3D scanning, producing 3D models of a lot of the material. We're walking past rows of red deer, arrays of zebras, a grizzly bear showing its huge teeth. Some of them are what scientists call type specimens, which means that they define a species of animal, plant, fungus or other organism.

8:18They're its essential form. You may wonder why do you have 15 representatives of the same species of turtle, for example. As individuals they have massive research potential. So if we want to know about how species change through time, how they're changing in response to how we've impacted the planet, we really can't just look at one individual to give us those answers. So while many of the specimens around this room were originally stuffed to be put into a Victorian museum now as technology has advanced we can scrape a little skin off of them and we can actually sequence their genome and compare it to that of living bird populations or living turtle populations.

9:02Potential use is only going to grow. So there's also a sense of keeping these things for the future because it may not be apparent right now what the value of this particular specimen is. 100%. And we know that because, sadly, we have many, many examples of species that used to be numerous but are now extinct. And we have some of the only examples of this biodiversity that is now lost from our planet. And they had no idea that was going to be the case when they first arrived at the museum. single hairs, fragments of horn sections of teeth can tell us about diet and health disease, movement I think as a curator you certainly don't work in museums for the money you do it for the interests not just the science but the stories, the histories the people behind the collections the politics of the time the way the world was and the way the world is becoming it is emotionally very affecting.

10:02There's no two ways about that. We're constantly learning. You never stop. That's one of the beautiful things about this job.

10:13And this, I personally think, is a very special part of the collection here. Along this long row of shelves, we have hundreds of giant tortoises. You can see them lining the rows on both sides. There are three tiers of shelves, each filled with giant tortoises. And these all come from really just two places on our planet, the Galapagos Islands and the Aldabra Islands. And even though I've been here for more than a decade, every time I walk through here, one of the things that I'm just always impressed by is just the age of some of these specimens. This particular giant tortoise we're looking at now, I'm looking at a label.

10:58It says that it was donated to the museum by Captain David Porter in 1813 or 1814. This is a very large tortoise, over a meter long from the tip of its snout to the tip of its tail. So this is something you could ride if it were alive. And that means that this was a full-grown adult specimen. These are very long-lived animals and so it would not have been impossible for this to be over 100 years old when it was prepared which means that this tortoise could have been born in this you know early 1700s so it's just that depth of time there's a heaviness to it it represents such a different time on our planet's history

11:47September 16th, 1835. These islands appear paradises for the whole family of reptiles. Charles Darwin was a young man in his 20s when he sailed to Galapagos on the HMS Beagle, decades before he wrote On the Origin of Species. He found an island of wonders. I industriously collected all the animals, plants, insects and reptiles from this island. In my walk, I met two very large tortoises. One was eating a cactus and then quietly walked away. The other gave a deep and loud hiss and then drew back his head.

12:30Surrounded by the black lava, the leafless shrubs and large cacti, they appeared most old-fashioned antediluvian animals, or rather inhabitants of some other planet.

12:43During our two days there, we lived on the meat of the tortoise, fried in transparent oil which is procured from the fat. The breastplate with the meat attached is roasted. It is then very good. Of course, the numbers have been much reduced. Not many years since, the ship's company of a frigate brought down to the beach in one day more than 200. Mr Lawson thinks there is yet left sufficient for 20 years In the afternoon the Beagle sent in our boats to take us on board The ship's head was put towards Tahiti And we commenced our next long passage of 3 ,200 miles

13:31A lot of our material comes from the height of empire, right? There is that aspect of the colonial history of the United Kingdom that is also captured in the collection and can teach us a lot. Were they going out to find specimens? It wasn't just that there happened to be a voyage of some journey and, oh, there's a huge snake there. Why don't we kill it and bring it back to London? They were actually going in search of specimens so they would be specialists with them who knew how to prepare it or keep it alive until it got home. Yes, there were kind of, I think, two different motivations for collecting specimens historically.

14:09One was they would say, oh, we've never been to the tapuies in South America. Let's see what animals we can find on top of them. And those would be opportunistic collections. And then there also, at one point in time, became a very focused trade in particular species. Crocodiles for bags, for boots, and definitely with birds. The milnery trade is a really great example of where many collectors went specifically to locations to get a particular species for its feathers that someone wanted on their hat. Whaling crews, mostly British, ate the Galapagos tortoises by the thousand, using them as living larders.

14:51These tortoises that we're standing around, we have representatives here of species that may only have 30 individuals left in the wild.

15:09These days, new specimens come in by other means. Maybe a stranded dead porpoise, or a parasite collected as part of a health programme. Fossils are collected in quarries, twigs from wild trees Sometimes a zoo will donate a dead animal Scientists still do occasionally sample and collect in the field under strict controls and only when necessary to protect a species During that colonial period they collected the specimens and bring them here Professor Flora McGigue is visiting London from Dar es Salaam where she's head of the Department of Wildlife and Zoology. Oh, coming here. I was very much excited.

15:56What I've seen so far is amazing. Flora and her team are building up their own natural history collection back in Tanzania, working alongside colleagues here in London. They're unpicking some of the myths of colonial times and the way British explorers were always credited with finds. The reality was more complex. I think it's important to correct some of the details, to acknowledge local people who are also involved in collecting this material, because you can imagine someone travelling from London to a very remote place and discover a new species. How come those people knew it on their own? There should be a lot of local people who are also involved.

16:41That's John Lyakura, specialist in amphibians and reptiles. John was thrilled to find several specimens labelled in Swahili. For me, it's a mixture of excitement but also emotions. And a very good example is this frog here, which is called Churamiti maridadi. Churamiti is a... This is a Latin name, Churamiti maridadi, but basically it's originated from Swahili and it means a beautiful tree toad. and it hasn't been seen for the last 20 years. So currently they are considered to be probably extinct in the wild. Hurry into Menards right now and save big money. Miracle-Gro raised bed soil helps you grow bigger, more bountiful plants.

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18:48Make your next financial move with confidence. Follow NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast on your favourite podcast app. This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm here. I'll just get you to come through this door. so we use these as airlocks to prevent pest getting in. Beetles, moths, silverfish, there's all different types of insects that thrive on eating the organic matter and or packing materials that have been used. So that's why you hear a lot about problems with anything, especially that has fur, feathers. If we have bad environmental conditions or, like, fluctuations and it gets really hot, or the humidity rises really quickly.

19:34You know, you can see that in your own house when you get a bug infestation. The same thing can happen with museum collections and it can really detrimentally affect those collections very, very quickly if we're not on top of it. So we want to make sure we freeze everything before we put them into that new clean space at the other end. We've had moths at home. We bagged up our clothes and put them in the freezer, but imagine doing that with a bear or an antelope. He is Richard Sabin, principal curator in the mammal section. So we're walking through one of the largest storerooms in this facility, down in the basement with huge antelopes.

20:14And it's mostly antelopes and gazelles that we've got. Elephant seals, huge creatures, incredible things collected from all around the world, large in terms of the physical size and weight of specimens. and they don't lend themselves well to be moved on the back of a lorry but that's the only way that you can move them. Here's a sight, a large zebra in a transport crate. Richard and his team have spotted signs of the dreaded moth nearby. It's stored on a bed of inert conservation grade foam which is inside a wooden frame which has been custom built for it to provide support at all of the relevant points.

20:59And then the whole frame, the whole wooden frame, is covered in a double layer of very thick polythene sheeting which protects the specimen when it goes into the freezer for freezing, stops ice crystals from forming on the surface. Some of the things that we've got in the collection are too large to go into any commercially available freezer, so there's probably going to have to be some kind of fumigation process that's employed, but that's to be decided. You're always anxious about handling this material. So much as we're going to welcome the teams of removal folks that come in to do the work for us, we're going to be watching them like a hawk.

21:34You have to. We're curators, it's what we do. We were thrilled to be a part of that preservation of the world's natural heritage. Yeah, it's quite unique in its challenges. We don't normally deal with the door, the height for a giraffe or the width for a large whale skull. Tim Dendecker and Alina White of Field & Clegg Bradley Studios. They're the architects who are designing and managing the building of the new storage and research facility near Reading. It's going to be the size of about three football pitches. It's going to be quite a dramatic building and it's not just keeping everything safe, protected and under the right environmental conditions, so that's the temperature and the humidity.

22:23You've got grinding rooms, fossil grinding rooms. You have a demisterium where these little demisterium bugs. That's a special room where flesh-eating dermisted beetles clean the soft tissue from new animal specimens. I think it's an environmental way to reduce a specimen down to just the skeleton. They'll be well contained within containers within the special room because obviously... In a far corner of the building. It would be catastrophic if they got into the collection store. You have large specimen processing facilities where you would, say, dismantle an elephant that's come in. You've got cryogenic storage laboratories.

23:10Where DNA and other specimens can be frozen in the liquid nitrogen and preserved for the future. You've got biosecurity laboratories, you've got molecular collections facilities, you have ancient DNA collection facilities and processing, you've got digitization. and trying to fit all those different types of functions which in some way connect to each other and to the collections, it becomes an incredibly fantastic 3D chess puzzle. While cranes and forklift trucks may be needed to relocate whales and giant tortoises, other creatures require tweezers. These are brittle stars. So similar to starfish, but they have much more wavy arms.

24:05Collections move assistants, Ashlyn Brennan and Amy Wahab. They are interesting to pack because some of them have a lot of very finicky, spiky hairs. Which can make them quite challenging to fit together into a rectangular box. So I've been trying to find a creative way to fit them in. So we line the box so that the specimens are on a padded surface for the move. lock them in place with small pieces of foam that hold them firmly so that when they are on the move, they aren't able to shake about and break. What's fascinating about it is that this particular array has been built or made especially for this specimen.

24:44So it's completely bespoke to this specimen and there's a sense of the actual epic scale of this because there's so many specimens, but they're all individuals. Brittle star-wise, it's probably 3 ,000 or 4 ,000 dry specimens here. Hugh Carter, curator of marine invertebrates. In front of us, we have a couple of specimens which are on corals. So these are brittle stars which live kind of entwined in the coral, and they basically capture food off the coral, more or less. And these were piled basically on top of each other in a box, but there's several different species and they're now being separated out and quite beautifully conserved.

25:30We're coming around the corner here and moving into a part of the collection now where we have very large taxidermied crocodilian specimens, those like alligators, crocodiles. Jeff Stryker, Senior Curator of Amphibians and Reptiles. I'll show you one example of special considerations for the move here, which is a taxidermied specimen of a green anaconda. Fascinating, but massive, with large paired spots running down the top of the snake. It is very wide. This is the heaviest living snake in the world. This anaconda, collected in the 19th century, must be a good 10 metres long. that really embodies a massive challenge of this move.

26:18Jeff wasn't here when the anaconda arrived 30 years ago. The story I was told is that it required a team of about five people, each with different parts of the snake, and each kind of manipulating and staying in constant contact with each other. Even with five people carrying it, how do you get something that big and that fragile down the stairs? Some of the large specimens had to come in here after the lift was removed and directly through the lift shaft. This definitely is going to need the lift shaft to get out of this building unless we make an incredibly difficult decision to break it into, which I'm just going to go on the record here and say I strongly oppose.

26:58So perhaps now, with the help of AI, we can get some computer modeling or something that will give us the optimal method for getting it out of here. Maybe we take out windows. We might take out doors. It might be the case that we actually remove a part of the wall that we needed before and won't need in future. Just imagine that. The people who live around here and walk past the store every day don't know about the vast menagerie inside. Then, one day in early 2028, they may see a wall come down and the doors will open and there'll be an extraordinary exodus of creatures. Wonderful creatures who've already been on many journeys, now setting out to meet present and future zoologists, scientists and researchers in their new home.