Fish Preserves
by Mark Miester
Photography by Jackson Hill

If you don't know the Tulane University Museum of Natural History exists, you are not alone. But tucked in its subterranean bunkers is a trove of zoological treasures well-known in the American research community.

"I hear the ladybugs are back." Like the aforementioned Hippodamia convergens, which have inexplicably descended on the Tulane Museum of Natural History in Belle Chasse, La., Harold Dundee's words hover, somewhat fantastically, in the morning air.

"In the last few days, I've been noticing a little upswing in the number of them," continues Dundee, retired professor of biology and curator of amphibians and reptiles at the museum, as the polka-dotted bugs float dizzily by. "There must be a pheromone."

Pheromone or not, a swarm of ladybugs is a fittingly poetic plague for a natural history museum, a nationally recognized zoological treasure that has enjoyed a quiet, subterranean existence for a quarter of a century.

Tucked away on a sprawling, wooded site on the west bank of the Mississippi, just upriver from English Turn, the Tulane Museum of Natural History looks more like a top-secret military outpost than an important research collection. Three rows of earth-covered bunkers, vestiges of the site's previous life as a World War IIýera munitions depot, line the grounds and represent the only encroachment of civilization on a tract shared with deer, wild boar and other fauna.

"This land has been a lot of things, going back to the early 1700s," says Henry Bart, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Tulane and director of the museum since 1993. "There was an old Spanish fort, Fort St. Leon. Then there was a big plantation out here. Sugar cane."

Cane eventually gave way to concrete bunkers, built by the U.S. Navy during WWII to store ammunition. The Navy abandoned the site following the Korean conflict, and in 1964 U.S. Rep. F. Edward Hebert oversaw a transfer of the land to Tulane to be used for bioenvironmental research.

In all, 27 bunkers dot the grounds of what is now known as the F. Edward Hebert Riverside Research Center. Most are used for surplus storage -- desks and chairs retired from the uptown campus -- or are just empty. One houses the U.S.-Japan Biomedical Research Lab, a neuroendocrinology research center headed by Tulane's Akira Arimura. At the northeast corner of the site, spread across four 10,000-square-foot bunkers and housing literally millions of residents, is the Tulane Museum of Natural History.

The museum might be a little off the beaten path, but to the biologists who use its collection of birds, fish, mammals and reptiles, it's a hidden zoological treasure. For 25 years, the museum has served as an invaluable resource for scientists and researchers studying the relationships of species, the branch of biology known as systematics.

"Let's say someone wants to understand variation in a particular species over its geographic range," explains Bart. "There's a big expense involved in going out to all the different places where that species lives and collecting enough specimens in different life stages to understand variation in the species."

While the prospect of devoting six months to traveling the country, scoop net in hand, in search of lamprey might sound appealing to intrepid researchers, it's not so appealing to university budget managers. Most systematists turn to museum collections like Tulane's to line up specimens. As a repository, cataloguer and curator of a wide variety of species, the museum takes much of the time and expense out of field work by supplying biologists with preserved specimens with which to work.

Ichthyologist Hank Bart, a New Orleans native who with a dry wit claims he sometimes has sardines for lunch, has directed the Tulane Museum of Natural History since 1993.

The first thing you need to understand about the museum is that it is a research museum, not an exhibit museum. Taxidermed tigers, mounted mongooses and skyscraping skeletons of stegosauri may be the images conjured by the name, but the fact is, most such specimens are useless to researchers. "They get high light exposure and don't last very long," Bart says. "The things that are studied by scientists are usually kept in places where you don't really get to go."

The Tulane Museum of Natural History, as you might have gathered, is one of those places where you don't really get to go, a repository whose customers are not school groups but scientists. Every month, the museum receives specimens collected by biologists across the Southeast in the course of doing ecological or conservation-oriented research. The specimens typically arrive preserved in formaldehyde, which protects them from decomposition. Museum staff members catalog and curate the specimens before submerging them in jars of alcohol, where they'll float serenely in an ethyl bath, holding with them a wealth of information about their life history, environment, ecology, evolution and more.

The museum's holdings include collections of invertebrates (primarily crawfish, crabs, shrimps and mussels), amphibians and reptiles, birds, mammals and vertebrate fossils. But the museum's largest collection by far, and the one for which it is nationally known, is its fish collection.

Looking for a harelip sucker, extinct since the early 1900s? You'll find one. Looking for a bluehead chub, pulled from North Carolina's Bearswallow Creek, circa 1962? You'll find 11. Looking for a Pecos pupfish or a scowling silverside? A speckled dace? A Tennessee dace? Looking for a Carolina pygmy sunfish? You'll find them all.

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