IS A HORROR MOVIE director’s dream of a nat-
ural history collection. You find it by driving 10
miles southeast of New Orleans, to a piece of
land that is part swamp, part forest, on a bend
in the Mississippi River, down a dirt track named
Wild Boar Road. Alligators and water mocca-
sins live in the tangled woods to the left. On the
right stands ammunition bunker number A3,
its flanks heavily bermed against the danger of
explosion, its loading dock cracked and skewed
forward by the more reliable detriments of time.
There are 26 such bunkers, widely distributed
around the roughly 400-acre property, most of
them abandoned. During World War II, U.S. Navy
ships stopped here to pick up artillery shells
before heading out to sea. Later the Central
Intelligence Agency trained Cuban guerrillas
on the property for the disastrous Bay of Pigs
invasion in 1961.
Tulane University owns the place now, and the
visitors tend to be biologists, drawn here by the
nearly eight million dead fish housed in bunkers
A3 and A15. (Another bunker nearby holds the
University of Louisiana Monroe’s fish collection.)
Inside, the fish soak in alcohol, in tightly
sealed jars of assorted sizes, lined up on shelves
that rise 10 feet high and run 36 feet long, in row
after row after row. Some of the specimens are
outlandish. A couple dozen paddlefish huddle
together in a five-gallon jug with their trans-
lucent paddles raised heavenward, looking
like congregants at an extraterrestrial prayer
meeting. But nine of the 22 rows in the main
collection are Cyprinidae, which mostly means
minnows. Ordinary is really the guiding aes-
thetic of the place.
It is the world’s largest fish collection, a title
that comes with asterisks.
“It’s actually the largest post-larval col-
lection,” says Justin Mann, the 38-year-old
collection manager, who spends much of his
time fighting back the mildew that paints and
repaints itself across the interior walls. It’s the
largest by number of specimens, he adds, not
species. In fact, more than a million specimens
belong to a single species, Cyprinella venusta.
(Yes, it’s a type of minnow.) The collection
includes outliers from as far away as Indone-
sia. But most of the fish here originally were at
home in the Southeast United States, from the
Gulf Coast of Texas to the Carolinas.
The Tulane collection consisted of just two
mounted fish when an ambitious young fish
biologist named Royal D. Suttkus arrived in 1950.
Suttkus set out to change that, on the principle
that you cannot understand the aquatic world
unless you can see it and study it, and you are
unlikely to protect what you cannot understand.
Suttkus was a relentless field biologist, wading
hip- and neck-deep in the waters of the region
over the next 50 years, pulling one end of a
10-foot-long seine net while a graduate student
at the other end tried to keep up.
Other fish biologists often roam from place
to place, collecting a little here, a little there,
always looking for something new and inter-
esting. Instead, Suttkus, who died in 2009,
typically collected from the same sites on the
same rivers year after year for decades, often
conducting mandatory environmental impact
surveys for paper mills and other polluters. The
customary practice for fish biologists is to lay out
the catch at the end of a run, choose a few fish
worth preserving, and set the rest free. The ruleIT
118 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC