As an avid aquarist that used to work in the ornamental fish trade, I am always keen to hear about new technologies being used solve fishy problems. One of the oldest is the challenge of helping the public identify species in large display aquaria. Singapore's Underwater World aquarium have solved this by tagging some of its fish with RFID chips to help visitors identify the different species on display.

According to Reuters, when any of the 20 chipped fish swim past a sensor, its name, species, and related info is displayed on a touch screen display. The aquarium's sales and marketing manager, Peter Chew, enthused: "Gone are the days when visitors are happy looking at animals and matching them with the information on the sign boards." Apparently the system cost about $20k (USD) to set up.

It is a cool use of RFID, though it obviously does not scale to many situations. At the NHM we have been thinking about using RFID on selected exhibits and in our library, but for most situations I think simpler and cheaper technologies like QR Codes (see my previous post on this) will be more scalable for areas like specimen management. We have more than 70 million specimens at the museum, and I don't see us chipping these with RFID tags in a hurry.