The United States National Collection of Aphididae
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The aphids (Aphididae) are one of the most pestiferous groups of insects worldwide, acting as
direct pests to crops, as well as transmitting a great variety of plant viruses. Their diversity and
species-specific effects on crops makes their identification important to agriculture. As is the
case with any group of insects, the most important tool a person can have in identifying aphids or
doing systematics research is a good, well-maintained collection of identified material. The U.S.
National Collection of Aphididae is the largest collection of aphids in North America, and one of
the largest in the world. It thus gives the aphid systematists in the USDA Systematic Entomology
Laboratory the ability to study and/or identify most aphids of the world. The collection was established from material of early workers such as A. Fitch and C.V. Riley. The first major efforts in slide mounting and doing systematic research on the Aphididae in the collection were made by T. Pergande late in the 19th century and up to 1915. Pergande left copious mounted material, and many notecards from his own collections and observations. These note cards serve as one of few sources of information on the live appearance of aphids Pergande collected, efforts he made to understand their biology, and what other workers told him about material they had collected. These cards have proven to be invaluable to many aphid systematists in the Systematic Entomology Laboratory and around the world. Since Pergande, there have been four USDA scientists responsible for curation of the collection: A.C. Baker, 1915-1923; P.W. Mason, 1923-1947; L.M. Russell, 1947-1975; and M.B. Stoetzel 1975-present. The collection is housed in rectangular 5-drawer boxes, each of which has three columns for slides. Each slide is kept inside a plastic or paper sleeve. This storage method is compact, effectively keeps loose labels together with their slides, and has advantages for expansion of the collection. Most of the slides are balsam mounts, with a few slides using other mountants such as euparal, polyvinyl alchohol, and Hoyer's medium. Nearly all the material added to the collection prior to Miss Russell's time as curator was mounted without clearing. For many species in the collection this uncleared material constitutes the bulk of the holdings. Material in the collection has come from several major sources. Valuable donations were made by F.C. Hottes, J.O. Pepper, A.G. Robinson, L.G. Strom, and a few others, and the various curators of the collection have added their own collections. But by far the most important source of specimens for the collection has been the aphids submitted from all around the world for identification. Many of these are collected in plant quarantine operations of USDA-APHIS. Many specialists around the world have deposited paratypes in the collection, adding to its value tremendously. The collection contained 84,405 slides at the time of this writing. The database contained a total of 2,405 records, with 2,086 valid species and 192 synonyms listed. The collection thus represents 44% of the 4,702 valid aphid species worldwide (Remaudière & Remaudière 1997). The collection contains type material for 628 species; there are 268 holotypes and 28 lectotypes in the collection. Continuous addition to the collection means that these numbers change frequently.
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the Collection
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With only a few exceptions, taxonomic nomenclature and synonymies in the inventory follow the list by Remaudière and Remaudière (1997). Junior syonyms are listed separately under their original combination only when there is type material in the collection. In nearly all cases, junior synonyms are filed in the collection under the senior name.
The comments section in the inventory provides notes about slide condition, species-level nomenclature, identity of the specimens, and so forth. Some of the more common pest species are sorted in the collection by host. Sometimes this is only by plant family, other times by a combination of plant family and genus. In such cases, the host-plants for aphids in the collection are listed in the inventory. The inventory is searchable within fields. For example, if information on the current holdings of a particular species is desired, simply search for that species name in the species field.
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