The Ghost Orchid Epipogium aphyllum is an extremely rare species found in a very small number of sites within the UK. The plant feeds by parasitising fungi, rather than through photosynthesis and as a result is largely colourless, hence its name. It was deemed extinct in 2005 but a new specimen was found in 2009 and was later collected after being eaten through by a slug. The National Museum Wales Herbarium has seven specimens of this orchid, five courtesy of marauding slugs.

The specimen pictured was also cut down by a slug but this is even more rare, because of the way it has been preserved. This specimen was collected in 1982 and placed into a solution of formalin. The specimen arrived on my desk last week and I have since provided new labels, a new jar and it is now in a new preserving fluid of 10% DMDM Hydantoin and 0.5% glycerol increase its longevity and improve visual clarity. By preserving this specimen in fluid its 3 dimensional morphology is clearly demonstrated and the fluid gives it an even more ghostly appearance.

Dr Victoria Purewal, Botanical Conservation Officer

We are onto our fourth activity of the holidays, this one is linked to the brand new exhibition of  paintings and drawings from India collected by the artisit Howard Hodgkins. The pictures are amazing, with so much minute detail and colour, something that our younger visitors have really been appreciating. So many great wall hangings have been created by our talented visitors this week, here are a few!

Dissected pigeon from the natural history collection of Swansea Museum, great for anatomical studies of birds.

Since the late 1990s, when the report ‘A Common Wealth’ argued that museum education needed more resources and a higher profile, there has been a shift within museums. Education is now viewed central to the role of museums and integrated into everything museums do. Museums have always been spaces of scholarship, and there is a clear link between scholarship and education. The purpose of museum education has to be to enhance the ability of visitors to understand and appreciate museum collections.

The new emphasis on learning in museums mainly comes from a change in philosophy within the museum sector, but it is also driven by funders such as the Heritage Lottery Fund, who encourage applicants to include specific learning elements within their projects. It is surely not a coincidence that the Clore Duffield Foundation has funded dozens of Learning Spaces in the past 15 years.

Local context of big concepts

The purpose of the ‘Linking Natural Science Collections in Wales’ project is to lead the way in the implementation of the Distributed National Collection in Wales. This, very much in line with the modern way of viewing museum education, naturally includes a symbiotic relationship with learning. One important way of using museum collections is to integrate them into the school curriculum. Schools should be able to use their local museum as a resource to support their teaching.

In Wales it has recently been proposed to modify the Cwricwlwm Cymreig, and to integrate the Welsh dimension into every subject taught in schools, not only History. In the centenary of the death of Alfred Russell Wallace, who was instrumental in developing the concept of Evolution to explain the diversity of life, schools up and down Wales ought to be able to call on museums for local examples. This local distinctiveness is important in a cultural context; it can also be used as a teaching aid, and this is where the potential of the Cwricwlwm Cymreig lies as a useful integration in the National Curriculum.

There are many positive local examples to illustrate the wider context, for instance Wallace (who was born in Llanbadoc), the naturalist Edward Lhuyd (or Llwyd, after whom the Snowdon lily is named, as well as the Welsh natural history organization Cymdeithas Edward Llwyd), Arthur Trueman's work on Coal Measure stratigraphy, T.N. George's contributions to Welsh geology, geneticist Steve Jones, Bill Frost's 'flying machine', etc. The work of these pioneers could be used to illustrate the subject and make it meaningful at local school level, as well as their personalities heralded as positive local role models.

Education resources

The Welsh Museums Federation, through the ‘Linking Collections’ project, will develop education resources for schools specifically linked to examples in local museums. These will be available online to teachers. Our aspiration is to create digital and web based resources, derived from museums, which are so easy to use, comprehensive and fascinating that they find a place at the heart of education.

Of course, while museums support formal learning, they can do much more than that and the educational activities of museums should not be limited to the school curriculum. Museums provide experiences and opportunities that many people lack; they stimulate discussion and debate; and they provoke responses ranging from joy and pleasure ('I have never seen that before') to disbelief and doubt ('I don't believe it and you have got to work hard to convince me that it's true'). All of this contributes to both our intellectual and emotional education and development and enhances our lexicon of experiences. And because we know that the habits of museum visitation are formed early in life and passed down from generation to generation, schools are ideally placed to support sustainable numbers of museum visits, and hence the focus on the school curriculum by the ‘Linking Natural Science Collections in Wales’ project.

This summer is whizzing by, we are already on week 3 of our busy programme of family activities here in the Clore Discovery Centre. This week we have been making beautiful fish kites to promote the diversity in our seas and oceans. We've been finding out more about sustainable fishing and thinking more about the choices we can make when we buy fish to eat. Some great work has been produced and here are some examples.

We have a great team of volunteers helping us with these activities, the last picture shows some of them hard at work helping to prepare materials for our workshop.

For more information on sustainable fishing go to www.msc.org and for information on volunteering go to www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/takepart

After waiting for 36 hours we finally left port and headed north to the Barents Sea. The sea is incredibly calm ^[1] and now we are here it is also a strange shade of pale blue, not at all what I expected. All the time we are accompanied by fulmars, sitting in the water on our lee side ^[2] .

We have started at the northerly end of our transect around 72.5°N. At each station we carry out a video survey of the area using a trifid like camera array called the CAMPOD ^[3] . It is seen here being brought back into the hangar after its trip just above the sea bed. Inside the control room ^[4] the operators log all biological and geological features visible on the video displays. Sitting on the right Gjertrude controls the camera while Geno enters data into the log, behind on the computer is Valerie, one of the geologists, who notes the sediment types and out of sight but to the left is the winch-man who makes sure the array does not crash into the sea floor! The sea bed is rather featureless here, an expanse of mud with few animals visible. Too much of this mud was about to appear on deck.

One of the sampling gears is a 3m Beam Trawl, designed to skim over the surface of the sea floor catching the larger "megafauna" including fish. As you can see from the discoloured sea, swollen net and mud on deck it acted more like a dredge than a trawl ^{[5, 6]} . The 'mud-larks' (Torjuis, Gjertrude & Anne Helene) get stuck in and are soon satisfied with their work ^[7] . Cruise leader Lys accounts that none is missing and Geno contemplates having to sort the animals from the mud ^[8] .

I quite like mud. It usually results in bivalves and I was not disappointed. The large Arctic cockle ^[9] is the most obvious but most common were, sorry for Latin names, Bathyarca glacialis ^[10] and Astarte sulcata ^[11] . Among the other ten, I got two of the species I had come for, over fifty specimens of Mendicula and twenty of Thyasira. You can look at my web site if you want to see more http://naturalhistory.museumwales.ac.uk/britishbivalves/. Perhaps the most appealing are these cushion stars ^[12] while the sponge is positively weird ^[13] . The cushion stars are apparently the favoured food of the king crab ^[14] . The giant was introduced into the region from the north Pacific by Russian fishermen who hoped to make their fortunes but it is turning into an environmental disaster as these voracious predators destroy everything in their advance down the coast of Norway.