Improvements to the Royal D. Suttkus Fish Collection, including updates to its database management system

Tulane University’s fish collection, named in honor of Royal D. Suttkus, who collected most of its specimens, is the largest research collection of post-larval (juvenile to adult-sized) fish specimens in the world, presently housing 7,407,714 specimens in 204,105 cataloged species lots. The collection is unique among fish collections for having repetitive samples taken from the same sites over several decades and high numbers of lots with large numbers of specimens of common fish species.

Specimens from the Suttkus Fish Collection support a wide breadth of published research, from taxonomic descriptions to studies of anatomy, invasive species, community ecology, conservation, microplastics in the environment, archaeology, and machine-learning based species classification. The collection will continue to grow by 900,000 additional specimens in 64,000 lots following Tulane’s recent acquisition of most of the specimens in the University of Louisiana Monroe’s (ULM) Neil H.

Douglas Fish Collection, which Tulane led an effort to rescue in 2017. The proposed project will provide for curatorial and databasing needs of both the Suttkus and Douglas fish collections. Students from New Orleans Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) will be recruited for internships that will involve them in the project and introduce them to careers in biodiversity research and collections care.

This project will make significant improvements to the Suttkus Fish Collection, expanding the collection to a third building on Tulane’s Hebert Center campus, creating two large collection storage areas in Bunker A-2 and moving jar lots from the collection’s other two buildings to these new storage areas. To further secure the resource, curatorial needs will be addressed for the jar lots as they are being handled and specimens and data from the Neil H.

Douglas (ULM) fish collection will be integrated into the Suttkus Fish Collection. A problem in the large-specimen facility (Bunker A-15) with alcohol evaporation due to the bins’ faulty lids will be addressed by replacing these with the 48 large new storage containers. In addition, the Suttkus Fish Collection’s Database Management System will be updated to make it more flexible, open source and compatible with modern data access and sharing technology.

The results of the project will be disseminated to communities of interest through conference presentations, publications, and software releases. Design of the collection management system will be flexible so that it can be adopted by any biodiversity collections that want to use it. All technology produced in the project (code, documentation and infrastructure details for the collection management system) will be shared openly with the biodiversity collections community, and specimen data will be shared with iDigBio (idigbio.org), increasing the accessibility of these data.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.