Kansas State’s Carcass Club, founded in spring 2025, aims to give students of all majors the opportunity to learn and improve their skills with research specimens. The club allows students to ethically collect specimens, prepare them for long-term storage and learn to organize and digitize museum data, according to the Carcass Club home page.
The club’s mission is to conserve specimens to study the general health of species in the area, build research for science education and to help students put their name on projects and gain experience for their resume. In Carcass Club’s first year, members added many mammal specimens to K-State’s Biorepository, which holds mammal specimens preserved from the 1800’s.
While the work is taken seriously, the club officers, as well as Andrew Hope, faculty member of Carcass Club, try to cultivate a friendly atmosphere.
“Andrew’s probably one of the most laid back people I know,” club member Molly Laughton said. “… There’s not a lot of pressure going into this for the first time at least … I’m just chilling.”
Emma Hambley, vice president of Carcass Club, helped found the initial group. After missing a required field trip, she was offered an opportunity to help prep specimens to make up the points, where she met the two other founders of Carcass Club, Litsa Wooten and Grace Dalziel.
“So I started just coming in like once a week during that fall,” Hambley said. “And then we were sort of like, let’s try and get Carcass Club rolling. Then that spring semester, spring of 2025, was when it was an actual official campus organization. So yeah, it was mainly like a thing that we did for fun and to help Andrew out at first.”
The group meets weekly on Fridays from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and allows busy students to come in whenever they are available.
“Sometimes we’ll have different [Carcass Club officers] in on different parts of the meetings so that way there’s always someone there teaching people how to do stuff,” Veronica Ritter, sophomore in wildlife biology and secretary officer of Carcass Club, said.
Each specimen can take several hours to complete, especially for new members who are still learning. Officers will take out a mammal specimen from the freezer for each member who will attend the meeting to let the mammal thaw. Afterwards, the skin will be peeled off and then cleaned.
“A full skin day would take several hours, especially [when] we have multiple rounds,” Ritter said. “People will come in, and then … they’ll learn how to do a full skin, then a few hours later, a second round of people come in and learn how to do a full skin.”
In addition, members are encouraged to request one-on-one meetings.
“If people want to go more in-depth … we’re always open to talking to them more about if they want to come in at a different time to get [a] one-to-one experience,” said Ritter. “It definitely depends on everyone’s availability, because we all have busy schedules … And especially for longer processes like skins, it’s really helpful to have a one-on-one experience.”
After being directed to the Carcass Club when asking for any research opportunities, Ritter applied to be the secretary of Carcass Club within two weeks of joining.
“For the first two weeks of me joining, they had their officer elections,” Ritter said. “And at first I was like, ‘This is my first year here. I don’t know if I want to be an officer yet …’ [but] the more I thought about it, the more I was like, well, if I get an officer position, then I’ll learn a lot more about the lab than I would otherwise. So I decided … the day of to run for the secretary position.”
Carcass Club runs on “virtually no funding” — almost every part is run by volunteer service, according to Hope.
“If I do get grants that are associated with research that involves specimens, then a portion of that budget is put towards curation,” Hope said. “So when those grants exist, then I’m able to hire undergraduate employees who are paid to lead these kinds of activities. But if we don’t have the grant money, then it’s all basically, it’s service.”
To get as much funding as possible, Hope opened a non-profit foundation account for the K-State Biorepository, where any donations are accepted. The Carcass Club officers also plan to host a bake sale later in the spring 2026 semester. The priority of the funding is planned to go towards wages for student employees, but it will also go to supplies as needed.
“Everything is slow to start off with, and so we’re in that kind of building momentum phase,” Hope said. “A little money can go a long way in buying basic supplies to make these kinds of resources available.”
While club members come in preparing to work, the officers put community first to make the Carcass Club something people want to keep coming back to.
“Even if you aren’t a biology major, we will help you every step of the way,” Hambley said. “We’ll help you out and make sure that no one is getting left behind [because] these skills do take time to develop. I’ve been at it for about a year, and I still mess up. So … we’re willing to teach as long as [everyone comes] in ready to learn. And we’ll all have fun.”