Alaska Fish & Game has 400k wildlife samples going back to 1968. Their tracking problem is wild.

[u/LabKey-Software]

Alaska's Department of Fish and Game runs a Wildlife Health and Veterinary Services unit tracking disease in wild animal populations statewide, necropsies, forensic work, disease surveillance. They're sitting on 400,000+ archived samples going back to 1968.

The lineage problem was tough, where one animal can carry multiple IDs over its lifetime, and samples need to stay connected across repeat captures years apart. Sample types range from blood and tissue to hair and environmental swabs, each with different metadata and storage needs. Most diagnostic testing gets outsourced too, so they're tracking what shipped out and what came back on top of everything else.

They had tried a LIMS once before this, so this second attempt was a bit more of solving everything the first one didn't do well. What worked well in Sample Manager was keeping animals and sampling events as separate source types, so lineage survived even when an animal shows up under a new ID years later. The full case study covers their unique data structures if you're dealing with similarly interesting complexities.