02/10/2026
Did you know that Tulane has the largest collection of post larval fish in the world? More than 8 million specimens are held within a landscape of WWII era ammunition storage bunkers in Belle Chasse, Louisiana. This semester’s Graduate Preservation Research Studio, led by Professor Aarthi Janakiraman, traveled there yesterday for the architecture but left with a new-found love of pocket sharks and preservation that reaches beyond the built environment.
The studio’s focus is on WWII era bunkers, specifically in the Caribbean, and they will be traveling to St. Thomas this March to document and explore Water Island and its aging military architecture. Tulane Biodiversity Research Institute’s site contains approximately 22 bunkers, constructed in the early 1940s with heavily-reinforced concrete and built into earthen berms, they mainly stored munitions for U.S. ships during WWII and the Korean War. The students measured sections of the site and documented exteriors through photogrammetry.��
Many thanks to Collections Manager Justin Mann for this enthusiasm and time! To learn more about their work visit: https://www.tubri.org/index.html and for an amazing open-access database containing information from fish collections in natural history museums, universities and other institutions around the world visit: https://www.fishnet2.net/
Tulane University Biodiversity Research Institute