Tom Turner examines a specimen collected in 1857.
Image: Dianne Bray
Source: Museum Victoria
Museum fish collections shed light on changes to the Murray Darling River Basin.
Dr Thomas Turner, Associate Professor/Curator of Fishes at the Museum of Southwestern Biology, University of New Mexico, has been examining freshwater fishes held in Museum Victoria’s Fish Collection.
Currently on sabbatical in Australia (based at the University of Western Australia) and working on Murray-Darling Basin fishes, Tom’s current research centres on problems associated with restoring the ecosystems of degraded rivers.
Using stable isotope techniques, Tom and his colleagues have developed a method of assessing changes over time in riverine food webs. Their ongoing research in the Middle Rio Grande River Basin (covering approximately 3,060 square miles in central New Mexico) provides a case study for characterising other historical river systems.
In Australia, Tom is using stable isotope signatures of carbon and nitrogen obtained from muscle tissue (both from preserved museum specimens and present-day fishes) to compare historical and current fish communities of the Murray-Darling River Basin.
His analyses will include muscle from fish specimens collected from the junction of the Murray and Darling Rivers by William Blandowski (Museum Victoria’s first zoologist) on the 1856-1857 expedition to the Lower Murray River.
Tom’s research on these fishes, many of which have been in the Collection for over 100 years, emphasises the vital importance of specimens held within museum collections. Natural history collections are among the most valuable sources of biodiversity, ecological and environmental information about the natural world—biological libraries held in trust for future generations of researchers and educators.