The documentary shown last night was amazing. I can not believe I did not know that Cornell has the largest glass collection right here on campus. I was stunned by the level of detail in each piece shown in the documentary and how closely they resembled the real organisms. This documentary captured the unique diversity in the oceans around the world that most people do not know about. I thought it was great that Dr. Harvell along with her team traveled around the globe to find these organisms and document them underwater.

The art of glass blowing itself was unbelievable. Some of the pieces were so delicate yet extremely detailed.  Leopold Blaschka and Rudolph Blaschka are the greatest glass blowers of all time. They created this extravagant collection to capture the details of these specimen so that they could be displayed and observed. In many cases they were used as teaching tools so that students could examine the details of each piece and understand how each organism differed biologically from one another. This was incredibly important because specimen such as jellyfish do not preserve well therefore the only way to show their structure and movements was to model them using glass.

They also produced a flower glass collection which is displayed at Harvard. It is a shame that through the years many of the pieces have been damaged however there are restoration efforts underway to preserve the pieces back to their original form. It is important for the restorers to know the original kind of materials that were used to create the pieces such as paint in order to make them the same as the originals.