And all of these situations have been experienced at one time or another by the various researchers who provided the fishes found in our collection. The majority of our fishes have been collected in Wisconsin and have provided invaluable information on species distribution in the state. For conservation or habitat management, the fundamental requirement is knowledge of what species occur and where they live. Museum collections provide this critical knowledge. A species' status as rare or endangered can be determined with the help of museum collections.
Food preferences through gut content analysis and breeding condition are examples.
Historical distributions are documented via the fishes collected and stored in earlier decades and provide information that can be used to determine long-term human impacts on the environment and to identify likely sites for reintroduction programs. By keeping specimens of the same species obtained from numerous localities, variation among populations can be identified. This variation might reflect environmental differences among sites or suggest genetic influences and the recognition of a new species. If specimens from numerous localities collected over a number of years are to be maintained as vouchers in order to explore biological variation and provide conservation information, museum collections will grow to very large sizes, just as ours has done. And with this growth there is a concomitant growth in information content and inherent value to scientists and environmental managers.