Morgan Collections
Morgan’s collections are an immense treasure. With more than 70,000 insects, 5,000 plants and 200,000 seeds from around Santa Cruz County, Morgan’s collections are likely the most thorough in the region. His collections have been to describe new species, document plant/pollinator interactions, and re-discover species once thought to be extinct. Today, Morgan’s collections have even greater value. They still contain undescribed species of plants and insects, and are currently being used by numerous students to understand how pollinator diversity and abundance have changed since the 1980’s.
Plant Collections
Morgan tracked the diversity of plants in the Santa Cruz Mountains since the early 1970s. His voucher collection of over 5,000 plants (all held by the Norris Center) and plant releveés from over 500 locations spanning the last 35 years have formed the basis for our understanding of the current botanical diversity within the Santa Cruz Mountains.
In 2005, Morgan published An Annotated Checklist of the Vascular Plants of Santa Cruz County, which contains a full list of Santa Cruz County plants as well as detailed taxonomic notes, lists of endangered plants and county endemics, and maps of the diverse habitats found in the county. As a plant taxonomist, Morgan described a number of new species, including: Agrostis lacuni-vernalis, Chorizanthe robusta Parry var. hartwegii, Polygonum hickmanii, Piperia candida, P. colemanii, P. elegans, Rydb. subsp. decurtata, P. yadonii, Trifolium jokerstii (in press), and Trifolium piorkowskii (in press). His continued work on several species complexes within the Trifolium genus have led him to collect and observe species of Trifolium beyond central California. His extensive notes and collected specimens from over 20 years of study made him a world authority on this genus.
Seed Collection
Morgan took particular interest in the clover genus Trifolium. Before his death in 2017, he had written most of a new monograph describing the clovers of California. Within this description were proposals for naming numerous new rare Trifolium species. Much of the work in his monograph derived from a thorough seed collection that he made containing hundreds of collections containing tens of thousands of seeds of Trifolium found throughout the state. The Norris Center is actively looking for botanists to help carry on Morgan’s taxonomic investigation into this genus. If you’re interested in getting involved, please contact the Norris Center at (831) 459-4763 or email norriscenter@ucsc.edu.
Insect Collection
Morgan’s insect collection is astounding. From 1989-1999, Morgan collected over 70,000 insect specimens from 39 different locations county-wide. His intention was to document potential pollinator visits to all flowering plants at a given site over an entire year. To accomplish this task, he visited a site once every three weeks for an entire year (approximately 17 visits). At each site he walked a transect that included representatives of every plant species he knew to exist there (based on his extensive plant surveys dating back to the 1970s). Using a sweep net along each transect, Morgan collected every insect he found on or near each plant. If multiple individuals from one species of insect were present, he often collected all of them and recorded which plant/flower they were collected from.
Morgan discovered several new insect species while creating this collection. These include the Ohlone Tiger Beetle, Cicindela ohlone (Kavanaugh and Morgan 1993), which was immediately listed as a federally endangered species. In addition, Morgan discovered several other new species that currently await formal description. These include a solitary bee (Hesperapis sp.), a robber fly (Stenopogon sp.), and two flesh flies (Metopia sp. and Senotainia sp.). Through his observations of plants and insects, Morgan re-discovered several species once thought to be extinct, including the Scotts Valley spineflower (Chorizanthe robusta var. hartwegii), a rare popcorn flower (Plagiobothrys glaber), and the Antioch sphecid wasp (Philanthus nasalis).
Randy stored his collection at the California Academy of Sciences during the 1990’s. In 2002, he moved his collection to the Norris Center as the Academy ran out of space, and as Randy desired to move the collection to Santa Cruz County.
From 2002 to 2015, Norris Center curators collaborated with Morgan to continue work on the collection. This included performing periodic preventative damage inspections, labeling approximately 15,000 unlabeled specimens with date, locality, and collector information, sorting approximately 20,000 specimens into orders, families, and morpho-species, identifying 2700 more specimens by continuing to collaborate with taxonomic experts, retrieving approximately 24 drawers of specimens that had accidently been assimilated into the CAL-ACAD’s general collections, databasing all of the bumblebee records in the collection, beginning to transcribe some of Morgan’s phenological records into quantifiable spreadsheets, georeferencing some of his collection sites, GPS-ing some of his exact transect paths, partially resampling at 3 collection sites, presenting findings about local plant/pollinator relationship to local conservation groups, and advising local land conservation organizations.
In 2016, the Norris Center received a 2-year grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to continue curation of Morgan’s colleciton and upload data from 30,000 records of pollinators to widely accessible online databases managed by the National Science Foundation-funded iDigBio project.
Field Notes and Writing
To view digitized copies of Randy’s writings, click here.
Randy not only took copious notes in the field, but also wrote a plethora of journal entries over the years, many of which were intended for a book. He took on many subjects, ranging from gardening to Pleistocene megafauna to land management to the meaning of the “good life”. He wrote about all sorts of things, yet his entries were all connected by one common thread: nature. In his entries, his admiration for the natural world and his disgust for how it has come to be treated and how humans have become disconnected from it is clear. He offers many thoughts and opinions, some sarcastic, some seething, but not without offering some hope and ideas for the future. Randy was committed to learning about the world around him, the world he saw himself as a part of, not separate from, and reading what he wrote gives us a glimpse into the depth of that commitment. At the Norris Center, we have just begun the process of curating this part of Morgan’s legacy. If you’re interested in helping us organize and publicize his notes and writing, please contact the Norris Center at (831) 459-4763 or email norriscenter@ucsc.edu.
