Archive
PRICELESS SPECIMENS
21/05/2021
Over the decades of surveys, explorations and contacts with other naturalists and biologists that I have had such great fortune to experience, I have acquired a motley and eccentric collection of natural history specimens – pressed plants, shells, feathers, fossils, Victorian stuffed birds, fish and mammals, lichens, fungi and insects/invertebrates of all sorts. Compared to my small accumulation of such things, a few of which I illustrate here, museums up and down the country, especially the London Natural History Museum, have huge collections of specimens. These are of great value for reference but, even with expert care, they deteriorate over time, although the cryogenic liquid nitrogen tanks of the NHM largely overcome that for specimens in those.
Enter the digital age and modern microbiology, and at last we can do much more than simply store specimens: we can record their morphology digitally in the minutest detail and barcode every item for anyone to access online, and we can extract their DNA, which only requires small samples, from all but the smallest specimens (which are preserved whole), and store just that in the -196o freezers. Just two tanks will be able to store the genetic data from every species of plant, animal, fungus and micro-organism found in the UK!
This is part of the Darwin Tree of Life project (see https://bit.ly/NHMtreelife), an extraordinary and ambitious endeavour to sequence the DNA of the >66,000 known UK species. These data will contribute to global biodiversity knowledge and the Earth Biogenome Project. They will greatly improve our understanding of species’ ecology and evolution, especially negative impacts of habitat loss and climate change, towards much more effective conservation endeavours.
Betts Ecology work constantly to protect and enhance biodiversity and fully support the science behind these amazing developments and practical applications of genetics, microbiology and the life sciences generally.
© Betts Ecology
