28.04.2025, Night of the Museums Hamburg

Do jellyfish and worms have sex? And how do you make crab igami? Many hands-on activities such as upcycling and gold panning, lectures and guided tours attracted 5057 night owls to the Museum der Natur Hamburg on Saturday for the Long Night of Museums. Of the 24,000 people who took part in this major Hamburg city event, 2884 explored the zoology section, 1156 the mineralogy section and 1017 the geology-palaeontology section.

This year, there was plenty to do for everyone who likes to make things themselves: Children and adults alike created new favourite pieces from old shirts and bags. Small animal artworks were created from bottle caps, clips and other items that would otherwise end up in the rubbish bin. Crab expert Nancy Mercado Sales not only presented the favourite objects in her collection, but also had a hand in making crab igami.

While visitors were allowed to touch many animal specimens in the education room and learnt a lot about the differences between the species, the museum's scientists gave an insight into their research areas and their work with the collection objects during lectures and the highly popular guided tours of the collection.

In keeping with this year's motto "We do it colourfully", they talked about the colourful love life of animals - including whether and how worms, jellyfish and other invertebrates have sex, how sexes can be distinguished on the basis of fossils and how fungi and bacteria have contact with each other on stones.

There were treasures to be discovered all over the museum during this Long Night, especially on the butterfly hunt in the zoological exhibition and in the geology section under the microscope, where fossil finds from the mountain debris were revealed.