Yes, this is a clickbait headline, and yes, it may seem like shooting fish in a barrel to complain about crappy data in GBIF, but my point here is raise concerns about the impact of metagenomic data on GBIF, and how difficult it may be to track down the causes of errors.

On a recent trip to the Natural History Museum, London, the subject of DNA barcoding came up, and I got the clear impression that people at the NHM thought classical DNA barcoding was pretty much irrelevant, given recent developments in sequencing technology. For example, why sequence just COI when you can use shotgun sequencing to get the whole mitogenome? I was a little taken aback, although this is a view that's getting some traction, e.g.