The ambitious project aims to

Professor Adam Summers of the University of Washington (UW) is working on an ambitious project: Scanning and digitizing images of all the fish species on Earth.

His goal is to set up an information center on the morphology of all the fish species in the world, making this a place where scientists look to each time they study the morphology and structure of aquatic organisms.

The task is not simple, because there are 25,000 species of fish on Earth. Mr. Summers installed a computerized tomography (CT) machine at the research facility to help him scan and record images of all fish species digitally.

A CT photo of the fish of Adam Summers.(Photo: UW).

They have just digitized more than 500 species of fish and are planning to collect thousands more species for their database. Summers also invited other colleagues to do the same to build a complete collection.

Mr. Summers describes his work mainly focusing on biology, more specifically biological simulations . He plans to use his knowledge of how the animal body operates under certain conditions to develop usable technologies to solve technical problems.

Over the years, Mr. Summers was able to develop different techniques that allowed him to scan many fish samples. This helped him reduce the expected time to implement the project from 50 years to just a few years.

According to Summers, this database system will be provided free to scientists, helping them to have more information channels for research. This is very significant because CT scans are expensive - about US $ 500-2,000 each time.