How To Preserve Insect Specimens in Hand Sanitizer

By Dejen Mengis, Carl White, Moriah Browning, Denise Williams, Sarah

Fisher

Purpose and History• Hand sanitizer is a gelled alcohol and can be used to create very cool

insect specimen displays that, unlike pinned specimens, can be handled by children and the public

• Specimens will appear to float in air inside the vials and do not sink or move despite any amount of handling (Sam Droege has kept a vial in his pocket for 2 months without any shifting, for example)

• This technique was shown to us by Wayne White, BCE, of American Pest who has used hand sanitizer to preserve and display bed bug specimens

Pour hand sanitizer into an empty vial

Choose a dried, alcohol- or glycol- preserved specimen

Which Specimens to Use?

• Specimens that have been in alcohol, glycol, or dried work well

• Specimens that are freshly killed appear to dissolve the gel in the sanitizer for some reason

Move the specimen toward the bottom of the vial with a probe

Bubble Removal: Water Bath Method

• At this point, there are probably many air bubbles in the vial. The next series of slides demonstrates how to remove these bubbles

• Air also exists inside specimens and needs to be removed or bubbles will gradually migrate outside the specimen over time

Pour an inch of water into a pot

Place the vial or vials into the pot, don’t forget that hand sanitizer will burn if exposed to an open flame!

Boil the vial in the water for 10 minutes or until most of the bubbles are gone

Carefully, take the vial out of the water

Use a pipette with a bulb to remove any remaining bubbles

Top off the vial with more hand sanitizer

Position the specimen as preferred Even dried specimens become flexible

Tips…• Thoroughly clean vials before use• You can add labels to vials that “float”• You can add things like beads, dried flowers, sand

etc. that will also float in place…and makes good “clean” fun for kids to make their own insect dioramas. OK, some adults like this too

• Always be sure to overfill with hand sanitizer and if possible permanently seal the vials to eliminate bubbles

Alternative Bubble Removal: Vacuum

Works reasonably well but….• Specimens and hand sanitizer tend to bubble out of the vial more easily as air bubbles expand under vacuum• Not as efficient as heating in removing all the bubbles in the vial• Vacuum pumps are expensive

Correspondence and questions can be addressed to: Sam Droege

(sdroege@usgs.gov)Thanks to Jelle Devalez for picture taking