Necessity of Research Activities in Aquarium

Abstract

　Research activity in the aquarium of Japan seems to be stagnant in recent years, so here I discuss the necessity of researches in the aquarium and the cause of stagnation. In the 1960's, many aquariums were established in Japan and included the purpose of attracting customers at the beginning. But as founder's philosophy, there was an educational purpose to disseminate knowledge of sea and marine organisms generally in terms of natural and biological aspects. Also, at that time there was little information on the ecology of marine organisms, and many citizens were interested. However, since the 1980's, aquariums were regarded as amusement parks, shifting the purpose as education to business. And when businesspersons took responsible for the management, they regarded research activity as unnecessary and obstacle tasks. Current researches on aquatic organisms are active in general, but many research grants are provided to researches on aquatic resource issues. No valuable aquatic lives as fishery resource are largely ignored and those researches develop slowly. However, importance and understanding biodiversity has been well supported in the world and the aquarium might only handle aquatic organisms including no fishery resource value to understand their natural values. The aquarium in Japan plays an important role to disseminate academics concerning the sea and river environments in general, and those researches are indispensable for carrying out it.