Collection history
The scientific material includes significant historical material from the Gazelle and Challenger expeditions as well as material from the Godeffroy, Ehlers and Pfeffer collections. The material comes from all oceans and from all continents. The biogeographical focus is on the southern continents against the background of plate tectonics and vicariance research (e.g. Gondwana drift).
Prof. Dr. Johann Georg Pfeffer, malacologist and crustaceologist was the first curator of the Crustacea collection (1879). In 1900 he was succeeded by Dr. Otto Steinhaus who took care of the collection until he died from an injury during the First World War. The curator position was then taken over in 1920 by Dr. Albert Panning (1920-1957) who was a specialist on sea cucumbers (Holothuria), but also worked on crayfishes. Among them, Dr. Panning worked with the Chinese mitten crab Eriocheir sinensis an invasive species documented in Germany since 1912 in the Aller River. The fourth curator of the collection has been Prof. Dr. Gerhard Hartmann (1961-1994) who worked with Ostracoda (mussel shrimps), his research focused on the biogeographic aspects of the ostracods in the Southern Hemisphere. Through his expeditions, he triplicated the catalogue numbers of the crustacea collection. Next to him, his wife, Dr. Gesa Hartmann-Schröder examined the sea bristle worms (Polychaeta) of the Southern Hemisphere and doubled the numbers in the annelid collection. Both scientists significantly increased the former Invertebrate II collection (Crustacea + Annelida) through different scientific expeditions, e.g. to Svalbard or with the research ship Polarstern to Antarctica. In 1995 Prof. Dr. Angelika Brandt became the head of the Invertebrate II Department, following the research activities of her predecessors in the Southern Ocean. Prof. Dr. Brandt research interests included the systematics, ecology, evolution, biogeography and biodiversity of macrofauna in the deep-sea and the Polar region. Through numerous expeditions to the deep-sea and the Antarctic Prof. Brandt has also significantly increased the material associated to the Invertebrate II Collection. In April 2017 Dr. Martin Schwentner took over the leadership of the invertebrate II department whom integrated modern molecular genetic techniques into the study of various aspects of crustacean evolution (e.g. DNA barcoding, ddRADseq, transcriptomics).
The current curator of the Crustacea Collection is Dr. Nancy Mercado Salas. Since 2020 she explores the collection, in particular the subclass Copepoda, with her research in systematics and phylogeny integrating updated molecular techniques and morphological data. Her studies emphasize on species living in extreme environments such as phytotelmata, anchialine systems and deep-sea meiobenthos. Additional research interests include the use of Next Generation Sequencing Technologies (e.g. Metabarcoding) as rapid assessment monitoring tools to evaluate rapid changes on biodiversity in deep-sea meiobenthos and the use of Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy as a tool to accelerate species descriptions. Currently, several active research projects utilize specimens deposited in this collection. Among them are projects on amphipods, cumaceans and copepods from the IceAGE expeditions in the North Atlantic and on planktonic and meiofauna communities from the polymetallic nodule fields located at the Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone in the Central Northeast Pacific.
