Education, Parasite Evolutionary Ecology, and Museums: Practical Applications

Museum collections are indispensable for understanding biodiversity including parasites, hosts, and their interactions. Technological advances have revolutionized modern museum practices, changing the skills future scientists need to engage with museums and utilize their resources to address global environmental and health challenges. Concurrently, museum specimens and digital resources are becoming more accessible and relevant to formal classroom education, fostering the development of critical thinking, data analysis, and problem-solving skills among students. Parasitology collections offer unique insights into host-parasite dynamics and support training in systematic classification and diagnostic methods, counteracting the decline in organismal biology courses and expertise. In this review, we explore the evolving role of museums in parasitology education, highlighting current resources available and identifying areas for further development. We begin by uncovering the historical connections between early parasitology collections and teaching, where instructors collected specimens for educational purposes and students gained hands-on training and expertise in diagnosis and identification through creating their own collections. We describe how modern parasitology collections embody aspects of the extended specimen concept by incorporating comprehensive information about hosts and interactions along with parasite specimens. We outline the need for specialized education and training in museum methods for undergraduate students in parasitology. This includes planning and designing field collections with the extended specimen concept in mind, as well as preserving, curating, databasing, digitizing, and georeferencing specimens. We identify the positive impact of museum resources on enhancing educational opportunities, including Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs). As more parasite specimens and collections become accessible through digitization, instructors can integrate virtual specimen images, data, inquiry-based teaching modules, CUREs, and mentored curatorial or research experiences in their classrooms and laboratories. We suggest that museum-based teaching materials can address knowledge gaps in biodiversity literacy, quantitative skills, and critical thinking, ultimately preparing students for future careers in parasitology and related fields such as conservation biology, ecology, natural resources, and veterinary and human medicine.