What's up on campus: A look at a few of the interesting things to be found on Auburn's campus

Jul 26, 2009 (Opelika-Auburn News - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- EALN | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- Walk into the right rooms on Auburn University's campus and you'll find thousands of preserved fish, moon rocks or WWI ace Eddie Rickenbacker's desk from Eastern Airlines.

The fish collection and the university's dairy are active parts of ongoing research and instruction. The boxes of old Extension photos are glimpses of life in rural Alabama.

In Auburn's 150 odd years, things have accumulated -- too much for one sitting. But here are a few.

A piece of the moon

Since Auburn's engineering program produced astronauts, it's seems fitting it also has a moon rock.

The piece of lunar rock was donated by alumnus T.K. Mattingly, a former Apollo astronaut.

The rock, no bigger than a thumbnail and encased in a clear base, will be on display in dean's office during normal business hours in the fall semester, Jim Killian, director of Communications and Marketing for the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, said.

Mattingly donated the rock as part of NASA's Ambassadors of Exploration Program.

"The thrust of the programs is to honor the first wave of astronauts because they were the risk takers," Killian said. "When they went up, it was a real crap shoot."

The astronauts were given a lunar sample which they could donate to an educational institution.

"One of the criteria is it had to placed in a public area. It couldn't just be stuck away in a lab somewhere," Killian said.

Planes ... bombs, plastic plants and mammals

Auburn's Aerospace Engineering Department is expected to have wind tunnels. What's unexpected is their size. They are not cavernous spaces capped by huge turbines, but smaller systems packed into the L Building behind the old student union.

The largest is a 3-foot by 4-foot closed circuit, low speed tunnel, built from World War II surplus and modernized during the last 50 years, department head John Cochran said. The others look like combinations of sewer pipes and air ducts, some with tests chambers measured in inches.

The tunnels, both sub and supersonic, are part of the department's array of diagnostic labs, including water and smoke tunnels, stress testing machines and laser systems.

In the 70s, they tested problematic bombs for the Airforce and other munitions in the old wind tunnel.

"At one time, we tested artificial foliage from Disney World to see how it would hold up in strong wind," Cochran said.

Arboreal mammals had their turn, too.

"One student tested a squirrel once. Stuffed -- not live," Cochran said.

Mating habits and not aerodynamics interested the student, he said.

Among the stacks

The special collections at the bottom of Auburn's R.B. Draughon Library is a repository for all things Auburn and an array of other materials.

Beyond the main room displaying 16th century Bibles and prints by British naturalist are shelves of Glomeratas and presidents' papers, Extension reports and yellowing blue prints documenting the evolution of Auburn's campus.

The archive is about 10,000 cubic feet, housing 10 million items, Dwayne Cox, head of Special Collections and Archives said.

Sharing space with the predictable holdings like presidents' papers are collections of discardables, the soft things of history often lost or destroyed. For instance, a children's pop-up book, one of thousands printed. Common things now, but give it time.

"Chances are, in a few years they will be few -- maybe 50 intact," library assistant Greg Schmidt said.

From these clutches of semi rare books and materials dedicated collections emerge, Schmidt said.

Some collections are online, others like the library's genealogy collection exist only as hard copies.

Currently, the library is digitizing its collection of Civil War letters and diaries for the conflict's sesquicentennial.

It's easy to get immersed in the soldier's lives and inevitably their deaths.

"'It's devastating," library assistant Joyce Hicks said. "You get to know these people."

In one letter, Asa Martin from Coosa County asks for a lock of hair from his infant daughter whom he's never seen. He wants to know who she takes after.

"All the kinds of things that would go through your mind, went through theirs," she said. "You get into their lives."

The critter collections

The Alabama sturgeon maybe extinct. Researchers lost track of the last known fish earlier this year. But you can still see one thanks to the Auburn University fish collection, a resource filling five stuffy rooms with 50,000 jars containing about 650,000 specimens.

It's a resource you're unlikely see unless you're a researcher or Biology student -- or stumble in to the basement of the Physiology Building.

It's just one of the collections in the university's Natural History Museum, which also includes vertebrates, invertebrates, plants and fossils.

The collection is organized geographically and has everything from local minnows to giant freshwater electric eels from South America.

Alabama fish makes up the largest group in the collection, curator Jonathan Armbruster said.

"We've got some really weird stuff," Armbruster said.

The fish are preserved in alcohol in thin vials, jars and boxes. The alcohol is all that prevents the specimens from turning to mush or jerky. Temperature swings cause lids to expand and contract, bleeding off the alcohol, eventually leaving the specimens exposed, collection manager David Werneke said.

In the context of monitoring half a million pickled fish, it's a serious concern.

"You can't re-catch a specimen," Armbruster said. "These are important collections."

They may contain extinct species or new ones waiting to be documented.

Upstairs in the Reptile and Amphibian Collection, there may be an undescribed species of siren collected in Alabama, according to Craig Guyer, curator of the reptile and vertebrate paleontology collections.

The collections are noteworthy, but so is Auburn for keeping them.

"Auburn University is an unusual place in that it has kept these collections instead of donating them to institutions like the Smithsonian," Guyer said.

The reptile collection has about 90 live animals, 50 for demonstration and 40 for research, he said.

In a snake-proof room, natives like Gray ratsnakes, snapping turtles and kingsnakes share space with exotics, like a Red tail boa found at the fisheries and a Cane toad.

On a nearby shelf, Knobby alligator snapping turtle shells document the big turtle's presence in Alabama and heavy harvesting by the soup industry.

At the foot of the shelf sits a a fossilized shell of the snapper's predecessor. Auburn has trays of whale bones, various vertebrae and other fossils of former state inhabitants.

"We have in this state one of the best fossil deposits this side of the Mississippi," Guyer said.

The Herbarium in the bottom of Funchess Hall resembles its counterparts in the Physiology Building. There's thousands of pressed and dried plants from Alabama.

Les Goertzen, Herbarium director, said the collection is used by Auburn students and researchers, wildflower enthusiasts and criminal investigators.

"The uses are huge and varied," he said.

The collection dates to the late 19th century and grows by about a a thousand specimens a year, or enough to fill one of the tall metal cabinets in the room.

While the collection is dedicated to the Southeast, they do try get exotics to increase the diversity, which is helpful to students, said Curtis Hansen, the herbarium manager.

The trick to drying plants, one that hasn't changed in hundreds of years, is the right amount of pressure and heat, which preserves DNA in addition to the colors of leaves and blooms.

"This entire room in a DNA bank of unequaled excellence in the region," Goertzen said.

DNA is, perhaps, just the beginning for the future uses for the herbarium and other collections, according to Goertzen.

"We don't know what the potential uses will be," he said. 'What is possible in 50 years is potentially unknown to us."

Dairy

Auburn's Vet school's dairy is no secret. School children, 4H'ers and other groups tour it, and all veterinary students must do a two week rotation caring for the 35 to 40 Holsteins, according to clinical instructor Herris Maxwell.

What is unusual is the barn at the Large Animal Clinic is the only Class A dairy remaining in Lee County and one of the few found at vet schools across the country.

"It's tough to do dairy in the South," clinical instructor B.J. Newcomer said.

The South's too hot, and producing milk generates a lot of heat.

But it is important for students to understand how a dairy works, even if cattle are not part of their future.

"We have students come in with a agriculture background and some who haven't touched anything larger than a cat," Maxwell said.

The dairy is a modern operation with students shepherding the animals through a partially automated system, focusing on caring for the animals and managing the operation.

Computer chips help track the cows through the milking process and provide a snap shot of the animal's health, tracking feeding, milk production and reproduction, Newcomer said.

The milk is shipped to a cooperative in Atlanta that processes, bottles and distributes it. You wouldn't know it from the label, but you may be drinking milk made by cows just up the road.

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