For many reasons, I have got hold of many bryophyte collections along the years, the've been indeed presents from now deceased colleagues. Among the collections are pieces of type material (iso-holo and paratypes) from several herbaria.
Now, I am the curator of a herbarium (QFA) and I would like to hear your experience on handling kleptotypes. I'm not judging anybody who's done it, but I wonder what's the best course of action.
I suggest a) scanning the slides and post the scan on a public website, and b) return the physical slides to the original herbarium, this may prevent future removal of more material from these types.
Return to the original herbarium for sure. I would always want my stolen items returned :)
Hello Juan; I'd contact the curator of the collection where each specimen belongs. Explain what you think the circumstances are and what each curator would like you to do with their specimen. I can imagine more than one respectable reply. Probably every curator of a natural history collection has a story like yours. Some peoples' collecting compulsions are without limits...the perpetrators'! Best regards, Jim Des Lauriers
I remember discussing this issue with friends many years ago while we were organizing some ex-students' collections. Since most studies were focused on taxonomic revisions, we had some type fragments. We contacted the curator of one of the herbaria to seek a solution on what should be done with those samples and if it would be better to send them back or to incorporate them into our herbarium as a duplicate of the original material. We were advised to do the latter, making sure to label it as a fragment and include the information of the original specimen's origin in our own label. We had a separate section for the kleptotypes in the collection. Since it wasn't a huge amount of material, it could be done easily. We also kept digital images of all the slides prepared and made them available to anyone, while the slides themselves were stored in the slides' collection in the laboratory. I am not sure if this is the best solution, but the fragments are now kept safe inside the collection (and not forgotten in a drawer), the curator of the other herbaria acknowledged and are aware of these material conditions, and we can trace back everything to the original specimen if any doubt emerges.
I have examined fragments of types that were at the Berlin herbarium. The herbarium was bombed during World War II, and many types were lost. The fragments are the only physical specimens that remain of many of those destroyed types. What we cannot know is whether the fragments were taken with or without permission. I don't call them kleptotypes because we don't know if they were stolen. I have cited the fragments simply as "fragments of the holotype (destroyed)."
I came across a similar situation with fungi back in 2015. Digitizing notes and sending back kleptotypes was the solution our curator chose. Here is a blogpost about it: https://beatymuseum.ubc.ca/2015/07/21/revealing-the-bandoni-fungi-collection/
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