Photo/Illutration Hiroyuki Motomura in the depository of fish specimens at Kagoshima University on June 3 (Katsuhiro Igata)

KAGOSHIMA--Row after row, jars of fish preserved in ethanol fill the shelves at the Kagoshima University Museum.

The collection comprises around 300,000 specimens, most of them from southern Japan and Southeast Asia, making it the biggest of its kind in Asia, according to university officials.

The depository also keeps photos of the individual fish as well as samples of their flesh to be used in DNA testing.

Fish taxonomist Hiroyuki Motomura, the 51-year-old head of the museum, has spent 20 years amassing the specimens.

The museum only had 16 specimens when Motomura arrived in the job in 2005.

“Preserving fish properly as scientific specimens allows people of future generations to obtain valuable information, such as the ecology and the environment that prevailed at the time,” he said.

Motomura, and successive generations of his graduate students, worked assiduously in the waters around the Ryukyu Islands, and sometimes even by travelling to Southeast Asia and further afield, to collect specimens.

In Vietnam, they obtained permission to collect fish only after visiting the country repeatedly over five years.

They had a hard time making Vietnamese officials understand that they were not interested in eating the fish they caught and only sought to preserve them, Motomura said.

CLOSE-KNIT NETWORK

The collection is supported by a network of like-minded people and continues to grow.

Fish arrive in a frozen state almost every day from a large number of contributors around Japan, including aquarium officials and fishery workers.

Some fishery company officials, for example, buy rare fish species at their own expense that they come across at auction and send them to the museum.

Motomura, in turn, gives the fish donors a meticulous breakdown of his study results.

“Just asking for donations is not enough,” he said. “You have to give something back.”

On trips overseas, he has been able to coach local researchers on ways to prepare fish specimens.

All the specimens in the depository are registered in a database. Around 5,000 specimens are loaned every year to research institutions around the world.

The database also contains photos of the fish before they were preserved in jars, which provides crucial information on how they looked when they were alive.

Many of the photos have been used in pictorial books of fish, Motomura said.

He is sometimes asked by public health center officials to identify the cause of a food poisoning case, whereupon he compares the flesh and fins that he receives from the officials with specimens in his collection to decide which species of fish is responsible.

As many as 180 new species have so far been found in the specimens preserved at the depository.

The collection contains 1,000 valuable “type specimens,” which are used as a reference for describing new specimens, Motomura said.

Volunteers also play an essential role in the endeavor.

About 20 of them get together every Wednesday to work with graduate students to prepare specimens. It takes about a month to prepare a single specimen for preservation, Motomura said.

Several hundred volunteers, ranging in age from elementary school pupils to those in their 60s, have so far taken part in the weekly sessions.

The specimens are usually kept off-limits to the public as a precaution against damage, but Motomura allows visitors to inspect them upon request.

“I hope children will take interest and develop even a little liking for fish,” he said.

Email (motomura@kaum.kagoshima-u.ac.jp) to arrange a visit to inspect the specimens.

Related News