At the time of his death in 1901, Strecker's collection was the largest and most important private collection of butterflies and moths in the New World. Recent curatorial work in the Strecker Collection turned up previously unrecognized type material. Another major element of The Field Museum collection is ectoparasites of vertebrates. Most of these specimens were collected by mammalogists and have excellent host data, making them a superb resource for host-relationship and coevolutionary as well as purely systematic or taxonomic studies. The Field Museum is one of the world's largest repositories of bulk arthropod samples of various kinds, collected by museum staff and associates and by collaborators from numerous other institutions.
Most samples have full ecological data.
At over 14,000 samples, this is undoubtedly the largest such collection in existence. The spider collection of nearly 100,000 lots is also of growing importance, with recent additions from Madagascar.