mickey alice kwapis

how to preserve a dead bat
how to preserve a dead bat

It’s difficult to find a concise guide to making a wet specimen because there are so many ways to do it. Read through this entire guide before you try the process so you can decide whether this is the guide you want to use. I will be providing links to others as well, which are great supplementary reading.

There are many different things that can be made into wet specimens. The most popular are fetal animals, organs, prosections and dissections (specimens that have been cut open or prepared to allow the viewer to see internal structures), and juvenile or adult animals that are fully formed. Regardless of what type of specimen you’re using, it needs to be injected or embalmed with fluid, fixed in a preservative, and transferred to new preservative before being sealed in a jar and stored or displayed safely.

One thing I can tell you is that every single tutorial on YouTube I have seen is incorrect. You CANNOT just dump rubbing alcohol onto a specimen and call it good. If you want high-quality specimens that last a long time, you have to follow a series of steps to ensure your specimens are preserved correctly.

First things first – where do you get an animal to work on? This is a tricky thing. Lots of people have varying opinions on what is or is not “kosher” in these situations. You can read this post I wrote about “ethically sourced” taxidermy and specimens. Spoiler alert: stop using the term “ethically sourced” to describe anything. It’s ambiguous and annoying. Sustainability is what matters, and I wrote about it in the post I just linked.

The majority of specimens I work on for one-offs like individual taxidermy or specimen preservation projects come from two places, a wildlife rehabber and a reptile breeder. I appreciate both of these sources because I know those two people personally and they care deeply for their animals. I am 100% sure that the animals have not suffered any type of abuse. Where you get your animals is up to you, but the most important thing when it comes to a high-quality specimen is to make sure the animal was frozen as soon as possible after death to avoid any type of decay or contamination.

This post was last modified on December 10, 2024 3:55 pm