#ScanAllFish

I am on a mission to scan all the ray-finned fishes in the world. And it's not just me! I am working with collaborators from around the world to create detailed CT scans of fish from museum specimens. One of the very, very useful things is to understand exactly what the skeleton looks like. It is shockingly complex. For comparison, your skull is just a few bones, but fish skulls are dozens and dozens of bones. In the first three months of the project, we were able to scan more than 500 species!

An important part of this project is getting all our results up on the web for anyone to access for any purpose. To allow the general public and every scientist out there to just download these data is fabulous. It also eliminates the needs for multiple teams to scan the same species of fish and using valuable resources for overlapping work.

These scans & data are available to anyone who wants to use them, for research or otherwise. 

CT scanner

This project uses a mini CT-scanner, which is different than the full-size donut scanners used in hospitals. By creating a "fish burrito", we can scan many fish at the same time, and it will only take only a few years to scan all the fishes in the world at our current rate thanks to our novel approach to scanning.

scans available

Once the scan is complete, I make them available online. You can see all the ones we've made on Open Science Framework here. We focus on using museum specimens, and for larger species we scan juveniles, not full-size adults so they still fit in our scanner. 

3-d printing

The scans can be used for research directly or used to create 3-D prints of fish parts for more biomechanics-related work.  3D-printable versions of our scans are on Open Science Framework here.