The development of the Annelida collection began in the 19th century with numerous collecting trips and expeditions organised and carried out by the museum's early curators, with the lively exchange of specimens from all over the world between various institutions and with specimens acquired from professional collectors of the time, such as the Godeffroy Collection.
Johann Wilhelm Michaelsen (1860 - 1937) was particularly important in these early days of annelid research in Hamburg. As a curator in Hamburg, Michaelsen supported his friend Alfred Lothar Wegener in the development of his theory of plate tectonics with his own studies on the biogeography of earthworms and their relatives. He travelled to South America, Africa and Australia to collect fossil and recent worms for his studies. Through his taxonomic work, he compiled the world's most important collection of holotypes for more than 1400 species, which form the core of today's annelid collection.
Together with colleagues such as Ernst Heinrich Ehlers (1835 - 1925) and Hermann Augener (1872 - 1938), Michaelsen also added many specimens to the polychaete collection through early collecting expeditions to tropical and polar regions, such as the Hamburg Magalhaensian collecting expedition (1892-1893) to Patagonia, the German Deep Sea Expedition (1898-1899) to the deep Atlantic, the German South Polar Expedition (1901-1903) to the Antarctic and the Hamburg Southwest Australian expedition (1905) to Western Australia.
None of these founding members of the annelid collection lived to see the greatest disaster in the history of the Naturmuseum Hamburg: its complete destruction by bombing in 1943 during the Second World War. Thanks to the heroic efforts of the museum staff, most of the specimens were saved by storing them in unused underground tunnels and chambers during the war. While most of the specimens survived intact, the sub-optimal storage conditions took their toll on the paper catalogues and labels of the vessels, which are now being carefully restored and archived for research and posterity.
After the war, the spatial restrictions in the new storage building and the different research interests of the curators led to a division of the Annelida collection into two parts: The terrestrial and freshwater Oligochaeta and Hirudinea (earthworms, leeches and their relatives) were integrated into the "Invertebrates I" collection together with the unsegmented worms Sipuncula and Echiura (both former phyla, now classified as Annelida) as well as cnidarians (jellyfish, corals), tapeworms (Platyhelminthes), roundworms (Nematoda), echinoderms (starfish and relatives) and others. The large collection of marine Annelida (Polychaeta) has been combined with the Crustacea in the "Invertebrates II" collection.
Gesa Hartmann-Schröder (1931 - 2022) maintained and developed the polychaetes collection together with her husband Gerhard Hartmann, who was curator of the "Invertebrates II" collection until the mid-1990s. Together they collected all over the world, with a particular focus on the southern hemisphere. Gesa Hartmann-Schröder is now recognised as the most prolific polychaete taxonomist of all time, having described more than 500 species, many of which are still valid. Her extensive type collection, which is still part of the Annelida collections at the Natural History Museum in Hamburg, is one of the largest collections of this species in the world and is an important source for today's polychaete taxonomy. The work of Gesa Hartmann-Schröder strengthened the position of women as independent researchers. She was followed by Angelika Brandt, who led numerous expeditions to the Antarctic and the deep sea and increased the representativeness of the collection in these little-sampled areas. These remarkable women almost doubled the number of specimens in the collection and increased the geographical coverage and value of the collection.
Today, the collection continues to grow through field research and global collaboration, and digitisation of the collection is well underway. Important changes in the systematics of annelids that have resulted from advanced genetic methods over the past 20 years have led to a new understanding of annelid evolution, and many exciting research questions remain unanswered. As a result of this updated classification, the Annelida collection now unites the groups Oligochaeta, Hirudinea, Polychaeta, Echiura and Sipuncula.