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Three Years, Thousands of Fish and a Labor of Love to Preserve Them All

By August 26, 2026September 8th, 2026No Comments

Buffalo Museum of Science Wraps up Go Fish! Grant Project

When you step inside the fluid collection at the Buffalo Museum of Science, you will undoubtedly notice the smell of preservatives and the floor-to-ceiling shelving units full of jars with preserved specimens in them.

What you may not notice—or even know about, for that matter—is how all those jars and the tens of thousands of aquatic specimens within them got there.

“We had a major inherited collection, which is a collection from another institution that we adopted, and it was pretty much unprocessed,” said Abbey Hines, the zoology collection assistant at the Museum. “And by ‘unprocessed,’ I mean they scooped their nets into the river and put it in a jar and put it on a shelf.”

That’s how Abbey describes the state of the fluids collection when she first began her role as the project manager of the Go Fish! grant project.

“A Unique Snapshot of Wildlife”

Abbey Hines looks through the fluid collection specimens she and her team restored through the Go Fish! grant project.

Her work on the three-year-long, federally funded project enabled the Museum to fully catalog and properly preserve all of the fish specimens in the fluid collection. At the heart of the collection, Abbey and her team preserved 1,173 jars of fish specimens inherited from the Hadley Collection. About 1,100 had not been properly sorted.

Many of those specimens were collected between the 1920s and 1970s, providing a glimpse of over 100 years of biodiversity data. “We have this unique snapshot of the wildlife in our freshwater area before any of the more contemporary ecological and habitat remediation efforts in the Erie and Niagara watersheds,” Abbey said.

“It’s restoring a resource,” said Paige Langle, the collections manager overseeing the Museum’s botany, vertebrate and invertebrate collections. “The fluid collection—like the fish collection—at the Museum had been neglected for upwards of 50 years and not digitized at all. They couldn’t be used and people didn’t really know they were there. They were in poor storage conditions and deteriorating.”

Charting the Course to Restore a Museum Resource

The Go Fish! project started with the Museum’s biology collection department well before it came to fruition in 2023. Paige was the principal investigator of the Go Fish! grant, writing the initial proposal for funding following the completion of a similar grant to restore the Museum’s mussel collection in 2020.

As that project wrapped up, Paige laid the groundwork for the Go Fish! grant. That included digging into the collection work done by previous staff, completing a full inventory of the collection and determining best practices for safely storing and preserving specimens in the fluid collection.

A shelf of jarred aquatic specimens.

The newly restored fish collection includes about 3,000 jars containing nearly 35,000 specimens.

“Fluid collections can be really dangerous,” Paige said. “Historically, a lot of nasty chemicals are used in preservation, so we had to figure out what the best practices would be to work with those materials safely and how best to preserve that kind of material.”

From there, she outlined the work to be completed under the grant to show that it could be done. “We had to think outside the box to figure out how we could tackle the project in three years’ time,” Paige said.

With the grant proposal approved and over $242,000 in funding secured through the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Paige was able to put together the team to complete the project. That’s where Abbey came into the picture.

Navigating Rough Waters to Preserve the Collection

Before Abbey and her team of volunteers could even begin to sort through the collection, their workspace needed a major upgrade to make it safe to restore all the specimens.

A fume extractor in a laboratory.

The new fume extractor that was installed in the fluid collection lab made it possible for the Go Fish! team to complete their work.

“We didn’t have very good ventilation in the lab at all and for the first couple of months of the project, we couldn’t open any of the jars,” Abbey said. “So, with that funding, we were able to make the lab a safer place for all of us to work—ventilation was added, the deionized water filter was added.”

Installing the new fume extractor and filtration system wasn’t the only challenge the Go Fish! team had to overcome.

In April 2025, funding for the IMLS program—and by extension, Go Fish! and other projects like it nationwide—was terminated.

“It was stressful, to say the least,” Abbey said.

The Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences (BSNS) recognized the importance of the project to its mission and the collection. So, the Society committed to maintaining Abbey’s position to finish the work. Thankfully, the funding was fully reinstated in July 2025, and the Go Fish! team finished the entire project, despite the setback.

They wrapped up their work with a special Open House on August 21. At the event, Museum visitors got the chance to see the results up close and to speak with not only Abbey and Paige, but also the volunteers who helped complete the project. (Photos of the Open House below)

Records of the Past Inform the Future

“This is a baseline historic collection,” Abbey said. “It lets us know what our waterways were filled with back in 1928, and how we, as humans, impacted the precious resource that is our local freshwater ecosystem.”

A woman holding a book.

Abbey shows a book of handwritten records and notes that the Go Fish! team worked to digitize alongside the fluid collection.

In total, the Go Fish! team restored, preserved and re-cataloged nearly 35,000 specimens. That work included digitally updating 1,182 existing catalog entries and adding 1,778 new catalog records on PastPerfect.

“There’s a cool chain of science that happens in museums which you can see a lot more prominently than in other institutions,” Abbey said. “We see the names attached to everything. We see information attached, and little notes that make it more human than you expect for a fish collection.”

Those records are now accessible to not only future work to be done within the Museum, but also by researchers outside of the institution.

“I really hope someone can take this baseline and do a resample to compare how our waterways have changed,” Abbey said. “We have a lot more habitat restoration, but many new invasive species have also been introduced. To understand how best to restore our habitats, we need to know what lived in them to begin with.”

You can view some of the results of the Go Fish! team’s work for yourself outside of the Museum of Science too. New signage is being installed at Beaver Island, Buckhorn Island, and Wilson-Tuscarora state parks as well as Tifft Nature Preserve, detailing different aspects of the ecology of the Erie and Niagara watersheds.

GALLERY: Go Fish! Grant Closing Open House

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