Nha Trang Oceanographic Institute

More than a hundred years of discovery in the seas off Vietnam are kept at number 1 Cầu Đá Street, in Nha Trang. It holds no photos from the internet or ready-made videos, only real sea creatures and real skeletons. There are also tens of thousands of specimens, gathered from the Gulf of Tonkin, through the open sea, down to the Gulf of Thailand. This is the Nha Trang Museum of Oceanography.

The museum belongs to the Institute of Oceanography, and the institute is not a new arrival. It began as the Oceanographic and Fisheries Service of Indochina, founded on September 14, 1922. Nha Trang was chosen because it was a convenient base for studying the sea. And just before 1930, aboard a ship named the De Lanessan, its researchers surveyed the waters from the Gulf of Thailand up to the Gulf of Tonkin. They went out as far as the islands of Hoàng Sa and Trường Sa.

A hundred years is long enough to gather a great many things.

Today the museum holds more than 20,000 specimens. They belong to thousands of species of sea life. In October 2012, the Vietnam Records Book Center named it the place with the largest collection of marine specimens in Vietnam. The museum does more than store them. It also keeps more than 300 species of sea creatures alive. They live in a system of aquarium tanks covering about 5,000 square meters.

The visitor route begins at the entrance gate.

The first stop is the area of tanks for live sea creatures. Here there are sea turtles, sharks, rays, eels and groupers, along with living coral and ornamental sea fish. Children usually love this part, because they can watch sea creatures swimming right in front of them. But this is not only a place to look. The museum raises and tends these animals for research in biology, ecology and conservation. In other words, each fish in these tanks is a subject of study, not simply a performer.

Next comes the hall of large specimens. It is often the part that leaves the strongest impression.

At its center lies the skeleton of a humpback whale, 18 meters long. It weighs about 10 metric tons. People of Hải Cường commune unearthed it on December 8, 1994, while digging an irrigation ditch. The commune lay in Hải Hậu district, in what was then Nam Hà province. The bones lay about 1.2 meters underground. As the crow flies, the spot was 4 kilometers from the sea. A humpback whale this large once swam in the seas off Vietnam, yet this one had lain buried under a field, far from the shore, for more than two hundred years.

Beside it is the skeleton of a dugong, also called a sea cow. It is a rare marine mammal, a distant relative of the elephant. Then comes a manta ray that weighs nearly one metric ton. It is 3.5 meters long and 5 meters wide. Standing before these specimens, a visitor can sense the true size of the great sea creatures. Photos and videos can hardly convey that.

There is a curious story about the dugong. Many sailors of old saw one from a distance as it rose to the surface to nurse its young. They took it for a mermaid. That was how people long ago explained strange creatures they met at sea, and it is not biological fact. Still, it shows how readily the sea gives rise to wondrous tales.

Next is the artificial reef area. It holds models of structures that people build under the sea. These give sea creatures shelter, food and places to breed, on stretches of seabed that are naturally poor in life. The museum presents artificial reefs as a way to restore marine resources and to help coral. The story here goes beyond the beauty of the sea. It is about what people can do to help the sea recover after too much has been taken from it.

Perhaps the most memorable stop is the exhibit on the marine resources of Hoàng Sa and Trường Sa. It lies inside a tunnel nearly 100 meters long, cut through Bảo Đại Hill. Inside are marine specimens, geological samples, and displays on the economic and ecological value of the two groups of islands.

The last area is devoted to marine biodiversity. This is where the collection mentioned earlier is kept. The museum presents sea life from many groups. They range from marine plants, sponges, corals and jellyfish to mollusks, crustaceans, sea urchins and starfish, and on to fish, reptiles and marine mammals. This is where scientific data is kept for the future. A specimen is more than a display piece. It is evidence of where species live, of their habitats, and of the history of marine research in Vietnam.

More than a hundred years ago, French scientists chose Nha Trang as the place to begin asking questions about these waters. Today, visitors stand before the humpback whale skeleton, 18 meters long. They look at tens of thousands of specimens from all across the seas off Vietnam. The sea is not only wide. It is deeper than anyone can imagine, and the Nha Trang Museum of Oceanography has spent more than a hundred years proving it.