Our permanent archives of several decades of zooplankton samples (full samples) are taking up a lot of space, need toxic fixatives, and are hardly used. I thought it would be better to replace them with vouchers for each taxon and life stage. Is it an accepted practice? How do you store your samples/specimen?
Fabio
We have run into this problem before as well for our long term benthic monitoring program and while it was still active the zooplankton program (Chesapeake Bay Program USA). Typically the contract stipulated that archive samples would be retained for a period of no longer than five years but in practice we held on to them for much longer (decades). Unless the samples are processed up to the point of identification and put into something like alcohol they will not be preserved well enough to allow adequate identification even if you wanted to do that in the future. What you end up with is a useless toxic mess you will have to pay to get rid of in the future. Your idea for voucher specimens is probably the way to go otherwise you will end up with all kinds of problems you'll end up paying for and that your contract probably won't cover disposal of the toxic materials in the sample containers would be my guess. Eliminate the process of collecting archive samples and you'll save yourself an immense long term headache and free up some funding to collect some real samples.
Thank you all so much for your answers. I guess it would be ideal if some DNA wizardry could already confirm which species we have, so that the even potential issue concerning cryptic species could be settled, and the archiving of large samples could be dropped without anxiety. Will look into that... Best wishes,
Fabio
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