University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point

The Stephen J. Taft Parasitology Collection in the UWSP Museum of Natural History (UWSP – PARA) was established in 2004 when Dr. Stephen (Steve) J. Taft retired after 33 years of teaching and research at UWSP. The collection was largely acquired and amassed through the work of Steve Taft and the numerous students he mentored over the decades of his tenure at UWSP. The collection is impressive in its magnitude and faunistic scope, with over 20,000 slide mounted specimens and additional hundreds of wet preserved specimens in vials and jars. Strengths of the collection include avian ectoparasites (lice and mites) as well as endoparasites (helminths and blood protists). The collection contains many invaluable specimens, such as those from hosts that no longer occur in Wisconsin, or others from hosts for which lethal sampling is no longer permissible. The Parasitology Collection maintains facilities for preparing new permanent slide-mounts and remounting slides. A small but growing frozen tissue collection and associated molecular laboratory support future research. The mission of the Parasitology Collection is to serve as a foundation for research and training, primarily of undergraduates, in parasitology and related scientific and applied disciplines.