The Otago Museum houses one of New Zealand's largest Lepidoptera collections that consists of more than 31,000 macro moth specimens collected across New Zealand over the last 30 years. Alongside this collection, supplementary information is found in detailed field notebooks that cover, for most sites, the total abundance of the different species present in these samples. We have been able to use the notebooks to work out the sampling intensity and sites to map both the collections and the abundances to some degree.It is impractical to collect everything. As a result, the common species are left out of collections and the rare and unusual sightings fill the collections. When planning to resample collecting sites to investigate changes in ecosystems, just relying on collections for species presence and absence would skew the results. It should also be noted that field notebooks are not a panacea for biological information as the information in them ages, so too can the reliability and accuracy of the notes within.Here we discuss how the field notebook data compares with the information accompanying the specimens housed within the museum collection. This is a recently digitised collection and allows an insight into the collectors sampling, vouchering and data practices and how these can affect modern interpretation and variation in repeat sampling. ‡ ‡ § | ¶

The 2017 redevelopment of Otago Museum's Discovery World into Tūhura, a bi-cultural science centre that reflected an indigenous Kāi Tahu understanding of the universe alongside a western scientific paradigm, was a bold move into new territory for museum staff, who had to become familiar with not only new forms of knowledge, but also to work comfortably with Kāi Tahu tikanga (values-based practice) and cultural beliefs.An integral component of the creation of a space reflective of a Māori worldview is the placement of a Kōhatu Mauri -a small boulder or rock loaded with symbolism that encapsulates the mauri, or 'lifeforce' of a space. In order to enhance its value as a receptacle for the mauri of such a space, a Kōhatu Mauri must be touched, thus increasing the actual mauri it contains. If a Kōhatu Mauri is treated as a typical museum object, isolated and untouched, the result is culturally akin to death and is symbolic of a lack of life and perceived value of its wider space.To fit with Kāi Tahu notions of value, a Kōhatu Mauri is usually selected according to aesthetic, historic, and whakapapa (genealogy) values. It must be firmly rooted in its cultural context, regardless of the space it inhabits.When the need for a Kōhatu Mauri for Tūhura was identified, short timeframes and recognition of the need to select a boulder that captured the above cultural values resulted ‡ ‡

Discussing the process from death to display for two significant Rāpoka, leopard seals, (Hydrurga leptonyx) undertaken as preservation projects by the Otago Museum. The first of these is a large female which died within the takiwa (district) of Kāti Huirapa Rūnaka ki Puketeraki in 2008. This seal was significant in the sense that it was the first marine mammal preservation project undertaken by the museum in collaboration with local iwi in the following the Ngāi Tahu Treaty of Waitangi settlement, where iwi regained the management rights of kā kararehe o takaroa (marine mammals) remains within the Marine Mammal Protection Act framework. This preservation project became a successful model for collaboration between iwi, government wildlife organisations, researchers and the museums when a marine mammal dies in the Otago Region. In 2017 the death of a neonate leopard seal pup, significant given its birth on St Kilda Beach, Dunedin within the takiwa of Te Rūnanga o Ōtākou sees the Otago Museum working to preserve this important leopard seal. This talk discusses the parallels and differences between the two projects, the importance of collaboration, recent applications of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT) scanning preservation methods as well as using more traditional methods of taxidermy and skeltonisation. The guiding principles have been to preserve voucher information for the future, educate visitors about this Antarctic species, to expose our local community to the ongoing links between Māori and the natural world, and to demonstrate how wildlife management, science, museums and practitioners in indigenous knowledge can successfully collaborate in the practical and interpretive context of curation.

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