The following e-mail in the lichen list from 17 September 2003 may be informative:

CAUTION ON LICHENOLOGY IN XINJIANG, CHINA

At the invitation of Prof. Abdulla Abbas of Xinjinag University I was offered the opportunity to spend six months in Xinjiang with all expenses paid. This area is adjacent to the area where Magnusson wrote his Lichens from Central Asia and described over 140 new species. This is an important area for lichenology because many of Magnusson's new species were based on small material and additional collections are important to understand the species. I expected to be able to collect many of the species he described from there in my collecting in Xinjiang.

The University provided me with a very nice apartment on campus. I also taught English classes to about 50 graduate students of the department, helped the lichen students with identifications, lichenology, and specimen curation techniques. Prof. Abbas does not speak English so all communitacions was done through students or other faculty. The lab facilities were fairly adequate considering the location but they have no UV light cabinet or light polarizers for microscopes. However, the herbarium was a very poorly curated. There were thousands of lichen collections, few with labels (and those were in Chinese), few pressed, many not packeted and still in the boxes sent back from the field. I spent seven days a week for six months packeting and identifying his lichens and, with a student, making bilingual labels for the collections. I tentatively identified about 50 new records for Xinjiang but, without reference collections and almost no lichen literature, I needed to work more on them. Prof. Abbas promised that I could take duplicates back to Minnesota. He also said that I could borrow all of the Caloplacas for study. I expected to be able to do a lot of collecting but was only able to get in the field three and a half days becaue I could not go alone and needed Prof. Abbas and a student to arrange transportation and guide me. I was only able to collect about 150 collections. I did collect several apparently new species of Caloplaca in these few trips.

As it neared the time for my departure, Prof Abbas asked for my list of new records for Xinjiang and I gave him my computer file. I wanted to pack the Caloplaca loan (over 100 packets) and the 224 duplicates from the herbarium. He told me that I could not borrow the Caloplacas because he did not trust me to return them but said he would divide all collections and give me a duplicate. I refused to take the Caloplacas under these conditions because many of the collections were small and some had only a few apothecia and if I did not get the packet with the apothecia it would be useless. One cannot understand species variability with inadequate specimens. He also wanted to check all of the duplicates I had separated with the herbarium to be sure they were duplicates becaues he did not trust me to select only duplicates. As I packed my own collections for shipment he removed all other lichens from the lab to be sure I didn't take any from the herbarium. After the collecting trips Abbas objected to my taking my own collections to my apartment to finish numbering because he did not trust me to bring my own collections back to the lab. At one time he said that all of my own collections would stay in Xinjiang and I could take a few duplicates back to Minnesota. No collector would collect under these conditions. He later verbally changed his mind and said I could take my collections and send back identified duplicates. I received notice from a student after I left that my packed lichens were not mailed and I doubt I will ever get them. It appears that the same thing happened when lichenologists from St. Petersburg visited Prof. Abbas. Apparently Prof Abbas seems to consider all lichens collected in Xinjiang to be his property. He will not let his students have access to the herbarium or to have any collections, even though most of the lichens in the herbarium were collected by his students. After six months, I have none of my collections, no duplicates of his that I identified, and no loan of Caloplacas. He has my identifications (and presumably will publish them), and my collections, and I have nothing to show for my work for him. I recommend all lichenologists avoid offers from Prof. Abbas to visit him to work on lichens.

Cliff Wetmore
Clifford Wetmore
Dept. of Plant Biology
University of Minnesota
1445 Gortner Ave.
St. Paul, MN 55108
Phone 612 625 6292