罢丑别听聽at the 黑料老司机 has North America’s largest聽聽that聽houses a number of sharks, including many species that live in Pacific Northwest waters.
聽is the manager of the fish collection. She showed UW News some specimens of sharks, from preserved catfish and dogfish that are common in Puget Sound, to a baby sixgill shark, baby conjoined twin sharks, and the jaws of a great white shark caught on a fishing trip in Willapa Bay.
Maslenikov says the fluid you see in the jars is not formaldehyde. Specimens are passed through a formalin solution that fixes the tissues and preserves their lifelike condition; then they are聽stored in 70% ethyl alcohol.聽When opened, the聽metal tank housing the leopard shark, for example, smelled like raw fish and alcohol mixed together — a little聽like a sushi bar.
While the fish collection聽is maintained primarily for research,聽it’s also available for the public to tour.聽There are more than 11 million preserved fish specimens from around the world, but most come from the North Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea and from freshwater habitats of the Pacific Northwest.
For more information, contact:
Katherine Maslenikov, UW Fish Collection manager:聽pearsonk@uw.edu
Kiyomi Taguchi, UW News video producer:聽ktaguchi@uw.edu