A specimen used for taxonomic purposes can still be used to gain additional information on natural history or physiology, just as a reference book is used over and over by scholars of different interests. In many cases only museum collections can provide new information on endangered or extinct species, as the animals are no longer available in the natural environment for study. Ecology A relatively new and exciting use of museum fish collections is as indices of past pollution. For example, collections of fishes form one area can be contrasted with another for tumors or other environmentally related differences in morphology. But much subtler differences can be detected as well.
Fishes living in a polluted environment accumulate a body burden of specific contaminants.
Obviously,, these techniques, in conjunction with properly curated specimens, offer unique insight into ecological changes through time. Interestingly, past collections were not maintained from an ecological perspective, thus one of the major drawbacks in working with older collections is that specimens of a particular species and habitat were either too rare to allow for destructive analysis or too few in number to yield statistically relevant data. In contrast, the bulk of our Wisconsin collections were obtained in recent years and are maintained specifically with an eye to contaminant analysis. All the things I've mentioned and more. We can only guess at the future uses of our collections, just as we can only guess the needs, concerns and technologies of the 21st century.