Fish in a Bunker

The Royal Suttkus Fish Collection

How Belle Chasse came to be home to the largest preserved fish collection in the world

Story by Kristy Christiansen • Photos by Paul Christiansen

On a tract of bottomland hardwood forest in Belle Chasse lies a little-known complex of three warehouses and twenty-seven World War II bunkers, half buried into man-made hills jutting out beside roads named for armadillos, alligators, and wild boars. During World War II, the bunkers held artillery for the Navy, and the property itself later served as a CIA training facility during the Cold War.

Since then, they’ve housed a willed body facility and the Tulane University Museum of Natural History. Today, though, most of the bunkers sit empty, except for three. These bunkers in the middle of the forest in Belle Chasse hold Tulane University Biodiversity Research Institute’s (TUBRI) Royal D. Suttkus fish collection, the largest collection of post-larval fishes in the world.

On a recent afternoon in June, Dr. Brandon Ballengée, artist and biologist, led an eclectic group of art hobbyists, fish enthusiasts, and even a bee farmer on a tour of the collection. “Come visit the dead aquarium,” he joked, entering a room where millions of fish stare glassy-eyed back at the ogling group of us. The collection’s 7.4 million fish are divided into more than 200,000 lots—or groups of specimens collected at a particular place at a particular point in time. Rows upon rows of containers filled with seventy percent ethanol are stacked on nearly floor-to-ceiling shelving with just enough room in between to walk.

At first, we all kept our arms tightly crossed across our bodies to avoid a disastrous, film-worthy domino effect. After some encouragement, though, we tentatively reached out to lift the jars from their shelves, examining the archival-ink labels placed inside, naming pufferfish, skilletfish, and notropis. The specimens range from the common to the extinct, varying in size from finger length to eight feet long—the largest of which are preserved in enormous tanks containing fifty percent isopropanol.

Paul Christiansen

“Biologists used to collect millions of everything in the past. There could be ten thousand fish taken per day,” explained Ballengée. “In the 1950s through the 1980s, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) would send out massive trawls to find species. That was the golden period of fish research. In the 1980s, the funding was cut. We can still work with NOAA, but not on the same scale.” The consequences of this, Ballengée said, are that less science can be done, and we as a population have less of an understanding of what is happening in the world around us.

The history of the museum coincides with NOAA’s contributions. Following World War II, Tulane University hired four biologists: a herpetologist, a botanist, an invertebrate zoologist, and an ichthyologist (a fish scientist) named Royal D. Suttkus. Each compiled their own collection according to their line of work. Suttkus, who was hired in 1950, started with two mounted fish. By 1968, he had acquired over two million specimens. Soon, Tulane’s Uptown campus was overflowing with fish, birds, mammals, and vertebrate fossils. The solution was to transfer Suttkus’s collection to the bunkers in Belle Chasse.

When Suttkus retired in 1990, Dr. Henry Bart, Jr. was brought on board to replace him as Curator of Fishes. Because of Bart’s work computerizing the data, the collection has evolved into a significant resource for researchers. Preserved fish are mailed to scientists worldwide, and many visit the Belle Chasse bunkers to dissect specimens and learn about fish morphology and the effects of microplastics, oil spills, or global warming.

“What we know about the biology of fish is known by studying specimens in collections such as this,” said Bart. “There are countless things we can learn—what they eat, how they reproduce, about their diversity, and even about new species.”

As a biologist, Ballengée studies species missing in the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and as an artist, he paints with the crude oil from the spill.

“We’ve lost about ninety-eight percent of wet collections like this in the world in the last fifty years. There is a loss of interest and funding to maintain them,” said Ballengée. In fact, the University of Louisiana in Monroe (ULM) recently cleared out its entire collection to make room for a track expansion. Bart organized a group to rescue the ULM fish and is adding about a million of the specimens to the Suttkus collection.

While the fish collection thrived, TUBRI’s other collections suffered without active curators. The vertebrates were largely donated to the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, and many of the invertebrates were given to the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science.

“It’s irresponsible to keep a collection without an active curator,” Bart acknowledged. “My hope is that before I retire, I can guarantee that someone is hired to replace me, and we can keep this [fish] collection indefinitely.”

The Suttkus collection has thrived impressively under Bart. As the group followed Ballengée through the aisles, he pointed out interesting specimens.

There are the primitive fish, such as the slimy hagfish—which has poorly developed eyes, no fins, and no backbone. They’ve been around for at least 320 million years and are ancient cousins to all vertebrates. The lamprey eel, a jawless fish with keratinized teeth, has been drinking the blood of other fish for about four hundred million years. Ballengée passed around a four-foot-long snout of a nineteenth century largetooth sawfish. Long and flat and edged with teeth, the saw, or rostra, was at one time attached to a body twice as long. Now on the endangered species list, none of the sawfish grow as large today.

Each shelf is a curiosity cabinet of oddities. The pancake batfish developed feet so it could walk around the bottom of the ocean floor. Then there is the bioluminescent female angler fish: when a male arrives, he bites the female and fuses their bodies together, thus living out the rest of his life dependent on the female for nutrients. There is the squat, grumpy-looking oyster toadfish and the brightly colored triggerfish, known for its bad temper.

Ballengée led us to a small, protected room set apart from the main area. We took turns popping inside the Type Room, the keeper of the paratypes (among the first specimens found of a new species) and holotypes (the name bearing specimen of a newly-described species). These are the representatives of their species, including the American Pocket Shark, the only known specimen of its species. The harelip sucker went extinct due to poor water quality. Tulane’s specimen is from 1893, the last year the species was seen alive. The oldest fish here is an 1838 minnow from Italy.

Paul Christiansen

As the tour wound down, Ballengée seated us around tables and passed out alcohol-infused specimens for a drawing workshop. While we stared through magnifying glasses and sketched the intricacies of the individual fish, Ballengée impressed upon us their importance.

“We live on a water planet, but we know more about the surface of the moon than we know about our oceans,” he said, detailing that there are more than thirty-five thousand known species of fish, and more are being found every day. “Fish are the most successful vertebrates that ever lived on our planet.”

He highlighted their phenomenal ability to adapt and their resilience to change—mosquito fish can clone themselves, alligator gars can gulp air when oxygen levels are too low in the water, and several species of fish are documented as being able to talk. In the northern Gulf, fish have adapted to metabolize limited amounts of oil. When the Atlantic cod were overfished, it adapted and started breeding earlier at a smaller size.

Today, the world is getting warmer, and fish are changing their bodies and adapting. “They are finding ways to persist,” said Ballengée. “It’s encouraging for fish. Here, in Plaquemines Parish, we’re losing land at the most rapid pace of anywhere in the world. What can we learn from fish about adaptation?”

It’s an important question, and scientists like Ballengée hope some of the answers can be found hiding in the bunkers at the Royal D. Suttkus fish collection.

Brandon Ballengée’s tour and drawing class is part of his Searching for the Ghosts of the Gulf project, which is part of his artist residency at A Studio in the Woods. Learn more, and sign up for a class, at astudiointhewoods.org.