A University of Washington professor has launched an ambitious project to scan and digitise all of the more than 25,000 fish species in the world.
Last year, Adam Summers installed a small computed tomography, or CT, scanner at the UW's laboratories on San Juan Island in Washington state and and began capturing three-dimensional X-ray images of fish.
The idea is to have one clearinghouse of CT scan data freely available to researchers anywhere to analyse the morphology, or structure, of particular species.
So far, he and others have digitised images of more than 500 species from museum collections around the globe.
"We have folks coming from all over the world to use this machine," said Prof Summers, who advised Pixar on how fish move for its hit films Finding Nemo and Finding Dory.
He raised $US340,000 ($A453,061) to buy the CT scanner in November. With each CT scan he posted to the Open Science Framework, a sharing website, people would ask him, "What are you going to scan next?" He would respond: "I want to scan them all. I want to scan all fish."
Then Prof Summers developed techniques, such as scanning multiple specimens, that made the goal within reach and suddenly a project that easily could have taken 50 years boiled down to just a few years.
"It wasn't just a joke anymore. We could actually say it and have a hope of actually getting every fish scanned," he said.
Scans typically cost $US500 to $US2,000 ($A666-$A2665) each, but Prof Summers' project provides free access to scans.
The scanner, about the size of two dorm refrigerators, is housed at the UW's marine lab on Friday Harbor, north of Seattle, where Prof Summers is associate director and a professor of biology and aquatic and fishery sciences.
The scanner can handle smaller fish; about two grapefruits stacked on top of each other. The average fish is about 30cm long, so he said he can cover half the world's fish. He's hoping to scan large fish using industrial scanners elsewhere, including at the University of Washington.
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