Effective 08 June 2020 and until the lifting of the General Community Quarantine in the university, the Museum shall conduct in a contactless manner its Scientific Name Verification Service for UPLB thesis students, enumerated below:

1. Any student who wishes to avail of the service should email the Museum through email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
2. The museum shall reply to the student with simple instructions and a link to an online form.
3. The information received shall be processed and the signed MNH Form 5 (Scientific Name Verification) will be emailed to the requesting party as soon as possible.
4. Students who have already requested the service and their hard-copy MNH Form 5 are already available at the Director’s Office need to email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to request the scanning and sending of their form through email.

For strict implementation.

SUBJECT:      IMPLEMENTATION OF PROTOCOL FOR VISITORS DURING THE GENERAL COMMUNITY QUARANTINE PERIOD

Effective 08 June 2020 and until the lifting of the General Community Quarantine in UPLB, the Museum shall enforce the protocol enumerated below before any visit from person/client coming from outside the University is allowed:

1. The client shall email a letter (through This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) addressed to the Director requesting for a visit and stating the purpose(s) of such visit;
2. The request shall be evaluated by the appropriate museum staff/section, concurred in by a section curator, and referred to the UPLB MNH Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC);
3. The IBC shall inform the client to accomplish a UPLB MNH CoVID-19 Risk Assessment Form for Visitors, accessible at https://form.jotform.com/201521306344038;

Today, May 18, is International Museum Day, celebrated worldwide. As our own museum is closed due to the pandemic, we wish to share to you a message from the Chair of the International Committee for University Museums and Collections of the International Council of Museums. -xoxo-

Dear friends and colleagues,

When this year started I was far from imagining that IMD 2020 would be so 'unusual'. We were planning to commemorate Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, the Museum Definition was everything everyone was talking about, by now we should be preparing our Annual Conference in Sydney. It seems all part of a different time and space, a different world. Still, the commemorations of IMD 2020 will go ahead across the world as planned, of course -- mostly on digital platforms -- with a 'physical' 3-day follow up between 14-16 November to coincide with the 74th anniversary of ICOM. Read more information here.

We sat down with Dr. Aimee Lynn B. Dupo, an entomologist and first asked how spiders jump for joy. "Well, for one, spiders do not just go hopping around just for the fun of it," she smiled.

"Jumping spiders of the spider family Salticidae use their jumping ability to pounce on their prey, usually smaller insects," Dupo added. Unlike grasshoppers, salticidae do not possess special leg muscles for leaping.

"Imagine them curling up a bit, powering up and coursing their blood into their legs, increasing the pressure and then releasing it," she explained. "If I had that power and I was happy, me jumping for joy would be an interesting thing to watch!"

Two new species of sphecid or thread-waisted wasps have been described by UPLB entomologists as homage to Filipino scientists who blazed the taxonomic trail for Philippine Hymenoptera. Hymenoptera is a large order of insects, which includes sawflies, wasps, bees, and ants.

Prof. Kristine O. Abenis and Dr. Ireneo L. Lit, Jr, faculty at the Institute of Biological Sciences, in an interview, were elated to share that their taxonomic review of the wasp collections of the UPLB Museum of Natural History revealed previously unidentified species belonging to the genus Chalybion. 

The all-important "Catalogue of oribatid mites (Acari: Oribatida) from the Malay Archipelago" has been published by taxonomy and systematics journal Zootaxa as a monograph, authored by Professor Emeritus Leonila A. Corpuz-Raros, curator of the UPLB Museum of Natural History, and fellow acarologist Dr. Sergey Ermilov of Tyumen State University, Tyumen, Russia.