New Year New Species

It’s finally my favorite time of the year, the holidays! It finally snowed last weekend and I got the chance to play in the snow with my family, which made me feel a little bit like a kid again. I still regularly attend the museum every Tuesday and Thursday, and I can feel a little bit of that holiday spirit in the air. People are wearing red sweaters and I’ve attended two parties, a museum-wide holiday party and a vertebrae christmas party—words you’ll only hear in an institution like this one. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that this festive atmosphere is also home to scientists that have contributed to the 70 new species discovered at the museum in 2025. Last week, I stood in the middle of these scientists chatting with one another about how good the steak is and felt proud to consider myself a small part of the institution that hones these great researchers and has the facilities to allow them to make these discoveries. When looking through the list of new species, I came across a suckermouth catfish recently discovered in the Congo, and realized that my mentor was credited for helping with this find. I had always known that he had contributed to the uncovering of new species, but seeing a specific fish never publicly named before displayed to the world was awesome.

I thought about our next steps in fish research—we had just finished DNA extraction and it was time for PCR, where we would amplify the specific gene that we were looking for in these fish that would help us understand more about their genetic variations. After this, it would be time to send the DNA to a separate lab so they could conduct a process called Sanger sequencing. My mentor himself was hesitant about the complexities of this methodology, but what I’ve understood is that Sanger sequencing runs light through the gene to identify each nucleotide (which I’ve talked about in an earlier post) and then records it digitally, ultimately ending up with around 650 letters of A, T, C, or G (the building blocks of DNA).

It’s so funny that the differences in these letters could lead to the discovery of a new species, and sometimes I forget about this culmination (hopefully) of our work. Spending two days a week after long school days in the lab—repetitively pipetting and adding liquids to other liquids, and trusting that there is DNA being isolated on a molecular level—makes it a little hard to fully understand the impact that this research might have. Yet seeing this list of new species among articles about other new scientific accomplishments and cutting-edge innovations has made me determined to be a part of this community. Maybe in the 2026 article I’d see another Congo fish and this time take pride in it being the result of our group’s hard work and our dedication to these tiny beings.