2025/11/01 by William Bernard Perry · 2 voices
Environmental Science · #Environmental DNA in Biodiversity Studies #Ichthyology and Marine Biology #Species Distribution and Climate Change
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/jfb.70309
openalex publication_date 2025/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/12/06 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Many of us can trace our love of natural history back to trips to the museum as children, demonstrating their crucial role in educating and inspiring the next generation of naturalists and science lovers. Museums and their expertise are also cherished by the academic community, especially fish biologists (Singer et al., 2020). This was demonstrated at this year's FSBI symposium in Belfast, when Oliver Crimmen, fish curator at the Natural History Museum, London, won the prestigious Le Cren Medal for his contributions to conservation, training and public understanding, over his 50-year long career. Yet, despite this, it seems that many museums are struggling (Kemp, 2015). At a time when cutting edge, flashy research, dependent on expensive bits of shiny equipment, is often what attracts funding, the core work done by museums, which lay the foundations for our understanding of the biodiversity crisis, remains undervalued and underfunded. For example, taxonomic and systematic expertise, preservation and cataloguing biological samples, as well as sequencing voucher specimens for reference databases (de Santana et al., 2021). Intrinsically linked to this is the criticism that some museums, like the Natural History Museum, London, are actively diverting attention away from these core scientific, collections-based, activities, undermining their relevance and driving a loss of expertise (Naggs, 2022). Instead, as highlighted by Naggs (2022), there has been a tendency to directly compete with other academic agencies, doing non-collection-based research on one hand and producing watered-down ‘Disneyland-inspired public exhibitions’ on the other. Back in 2023, we highlighted the rather magical ability for us to step inside the ‘omics time machine’ by using DNA extracted from the tissue of museum samples (Perry, 2023). The paper by Delling et al. (2023) looked at samples from the now-extinct Moroccan trout (Salmo pallaryi) collected between 1924 and 1936, giving insights into how these fish slot into the current phylogenetic landscape – a concept which has also been explored previously (Splendiani et al., 2017). This field, termed ‘museomics’, highlights the invaluable role museums play in our understanding of biodiversity and is completely dependent on their unique collections. In this issue, we step inside the omics time machine once again, courtesy of Nambiar et al. (2025), but this time, at a microscopic level, examining the intestinal microflora of fish gone by. Zipping back to 2009, Barack Obama had just become US president, Avatar topped the box office, the Black Eyes Peas just realised ‘I Gotta Feeling’ and Sir David Attenborough and Prince William opened the £78 million Darwin Centre at the National History Museum London—a time of optimism. But most importantly, it was in this year that the fish used by Nambiar et al. (2025) were caught on a research expedition to the Gulf of Carpentaria (Northern Queensland, Australia), a marine ecosystem covering a coral reef province. They were then frozen at −20°C. Back to the present day, the over 100 frozen fish (7 species belonging to Labridae and Platycephalidae families) from the CSIRO Australian Natural Fish Collection were analysed. 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene metabarcoding was used to characterise bacterial communities from the thawed fish guts, with half of the samples providing DNA of suitable yield and quality for sequencing; the results of which give a glimpse back to 2009. Bacterial community structure was seen to significantly differ between the two fish families, likely due to habitat use, but contained bacterial phyla typical of these fish species. As highlighted by Nambiar et al. (2025), these results demonstrate a new potential to use specimens stored in regular freezers (i.e., not costly, energy guzzling −80°C freezers) for establishing long-term gut microbiome datasets. Given the intimate relationship between the gut microbiome and its hosts, long-term datasets provide a valuable lens in which to view environmental change, as they can potentially encapsulate changes in habitat, stress, diet and host fitness. Moreover, it demonstrates the value of natural history collections and the institutions dedicated to sustaining and curating them.