What would you do if you had a year to identify and evaluate the contents of your natural history collection? A quarter of a million specimens spread over two sites, that’s an average 2 minutes and 6 seconds per specimen. If you must insist on eating, sleeping, travelling from one site to the other… that time per item rapidly dwindles.

These are the issues facing the Horniman Museum’s Russell Dornan and the Bioblitz team. Despite his daunting schedule Russell still found time to come and talk to us for three hours. That gives the PubSci audience a collective value of 85.7 museum specimens. I’m very flattered by that!

The issues that face the Bioblitz process are numerous: in the liquid stores you have a giant fan running in the background that prevents you thinking when it’s on and stops you breathing when it’s off; Elsewhere, the drawers and storage units…