The National Research Collections Australia hosted by CSIRO bring together 13 million specimens from the insect collection and the wildlife collection, supporting everything from tracking pest incursions to discovering new species and understanding the genetic diversity of Australia’s native ecosystems.
The new facility includes genomics laboratories and digitisation facilities that will allow scientists to extract and share more information from research specimens than ever before, connecting physical collections with digital platforms, from DNA sequences to high-resolution images.
A giant bee
Dr Mike Hodda, a biosecurity specialist, is trying to put a number on it.
“For insects, we think the value is probably around $100 to $200 per specimen,” Mike says.
“That means our insect collection is worth over $1 billion. But our specimens are irreplaceable. We can go back to a place and try to collect a new specimen, but we can’t go back in time to collect one that represents the past.”
Sadly, one specimen that is easier to put a dollar figure on is Wallace’s Giant Bee. The largest bee species in the world, it lives on a small island in Indonesia. Although it is vulnerable to extinction, specimens are traded online for several thousand dollars each.
This specimen, the only one of its kind in our collection, was intercepted at Australia’s border in 2023.
Leaping lizards!
Dr Clare Holleley, director of our vertebrate collections, has pioneered a method to work with the DNA of decades-old specimens that were preserved using formaldehyde and then stored in ethanol.
“We can read which genes were switched on animals and compare them across time and place. When we match this to environmental data, it reveals how animals have responded and adapted to environmental pressures such as drought and heat,” Clare says.
“This breakthrough has opened up collections as a resource for understanding how to manage species in a changing climate.”
A very hungry spider wasp
This is Ctenostegus immitis, a large wasp with an incredibly painful sting. Its venom has been tailored by nature to paralyse the spiders that the females hunt, sting and entomb to lay their eggs inside.
The complex chemical cocktail of a spider wasp’s venom keeps a spider alive in suspended animation while a larval spider wasp hatches and eats it from the inside out.
Dr Juanita Rodriguez and her team are using spider wasp specimens in the collection to study the venoms of different species.
“Spider wasp venoms have an affect on sodium channels in the human central nervous system. We’re interested in these venoms for drug development to treat conditions such as Alzheimer’s and epilepsy,” Juanita says.
A surprising skull
Our specimens date back decades, sometimes centuries. Stored safely, biodiversity specimens will last indefinitely.
This is the skull of a Thylacine found in a cave near Canberra in 1969. It’s about 4000 years old and now lives in our bone vault.
Bones and teeth in our collection are a reference for identifying species, especially useful for identifying the remains of rare or threatened species. Some species of mammals can be identified from just a single tooth.
An enemy of trees
Our collections are important for protecting Australia’s biodiversity. It’s vital to be able to distinguish the pests from the rest!
This is a tiny nematode (round worm) that causes huge damage to pine tree plantations overseas. Fortunately Pine Wood Nematode doesn’t occur in Australia. And thanks to work at our collections, there’s now a diagnostic protocol to help tell it apart from other kinds of nematodes and keep it out.
The life cycle of Pine Wood Nematode requires a beetle and a fungus – a trio of characters.
“I should add that it appears that the nematode carries a bacterium,” Mike says.
“The new molecular laboratories at our collections facility let us carry out the full range of activities from preparing, curating and storing specimens to analysing their DNA.”
An Emperor frozen in time
It took nine months to relocate 13 million plus specimens of wildlife, insects and plants into our new collections facility, known as Diversity.
From tiny wasps that look like tea leaves and trays of colour butterflies, to preserved sea birds and the bones of marine mammals, the specimens were a spectacular sight for the curation and relocation teams.
This Emperor Penguin was lodged with our collection after being found deceased in Antarctica. Like all of our specimens, it was frozen for two weeks on its way into the new building to kill any pest insects (and their eggs) that might attack the collections.
Many insects clean up dead organic matter in nature and would love to get their mouthparts on our specimens. We use a range of controls, from climate controlled vaults with positive air pressure, to sticky traps and visual pest checks.
Frozen penguin among millions of specimens moved to new home at CSIRO's National Collections Building - ABC News
A lost stick insect
Can we bring back extinct species?
Not exactly, but we did use our collection to confirm that the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect still lives!
We hold two specimens of the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect. They were collected in the 1930s, just before the introduction of black rats caused their “extinction”.
The species was rediscovered in 2001 on Balls Pyramid, a spectacular rocky islet 20km away from the main island. But the rediscovered wild specimens looked different – they were darker and thinner.
Scientists turned to the original specimens in our collection to check if these really were the same species. They took tiny samples from the specimens and sequenced their DNA for comparison.
The mitochondrial genomes matched, with only slight differences, which proved they were the same species. This stick insect was back!
DNA tests confirm Lord Howe Island stick insect lives - CSIRO
An orchid in spirit
This specimen is one of 17,000 orchids floating in ethanol, preserved to capture their three-dimensional structure for future science.
Prior to the move, curators spent months securing our collection of orchids and other plants preserved in ethanol. They updated storage jars, created a more effective numbering system and swapped out toxic formaldehyde for a much safer ethanol mix that is similar to hand sanitiser.
Our Spirit Collection, for all your (super)natural needs - CSIRO
Most egg-scellent
Our Australian National Wildlife Collection holds 31,000 clutches of eggs from more than 1000 species of birds. It's a heritage and research collection, built by donations from the families of private collectors (egg collecting has been illegal in Australia since the 1960s).
Eggshells give clues about biology, and changes in distribution and behaviours. Scientists can extract DNA, even from thin eggshells, to confirm species IDs and reconstruct near-complete mitochondrial genomes.
Dr Clare Holleley was curious about cuckoo eggs lurking in many of the clutches in the egg collection and used these to study cuckoo eggshell evolution. Cuckoo eggs often look like those of their unfortunate host. Clare and her team found thicker eggshells for cuckoos laying their eggs in dome-shaped nests of hosts.
“In dome shaped nests, cuckoos need to drop their eggs from a height, onto other eggs already in the nest. Therefore, thicker shells would help protect them from the fall,” Clare said.
This was an un-egg-spected plot twist! The team had thought that cuckoo eggs laid in cup-shaped nests would have thicker eggshells to protect against ejection by hosts.
A very caring ant
This is Anonychomyrma inclinata, which was described and named as a species in 2022. We name up to 200 species that are new to science each year.
In one of nature’s strangest relationships, these ants care for the caterpillars of the endangered Bulloak Jewel butterfly, one of Australia’s rarest and most beautiful butterflies.
The two species live together in mature Bulloak trees, where the butterfly caterpillars live under bark and are carried by ants to feed on soft Bulloak leaves to feed at night. The ants guard the caterpillars from predators and receive a sugary gift in return.
Dr Jon Lewis is one of the researchers who named the ant species.
“A beautiful, rare butterfly that can only breed when a specific ant species babysits its caterpillars seems to amaze most people,” Jon says.
“Naming the ant was important because it is crucial to the conservation of this butterfly.”
A bonus number 11
We love our Ulysses butterflies!