津波に襲われた海藻標本の救出山田町立鯨と海の科学館での事例

摘要

The marine algal herbarium in the Municipal Science Museum of Whale and Ocean, Yamada, Iwate Prefecture, Japan was utterly destroyed by the tsunami on March 11, 2011. Eighty thousand dried specimens and two thousand and five hundred liquid specimens of seaweed stored in the herbarium, which were mainly donated by Makoto Yoshizaki (Professor Emeritus of Toho University) in the December 2010, were submerged in seawater. After the day over ten thousand specimens were salvaged and restored by the people of Yamada Town, curators of the Iwate Prefectural Museum, Morioka, and the author, using the same procedure for making dried specimens of seaweeds. It is desirable for the safety of botanical collections against abrupt natural disasters that the duplicate specimens be dispersed to the other herbaria in domestic and foreign museums.