Status of Red Stingray (Dasyatis akajei) Livers for Japanese Specimen Banking at National Institute for Environmental Studies, Unscathed by the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake.

It is important to have a resource of environmental specimens in order to investigate changes in contaminant exposure and accumulation over time. At the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan, red stingray livers have been archived and the banking activity has expanded successfully since 2003. The developed standard operating procedure helps to maintain quality of the archived homogenized liver samples, and the risk management plan has helped to prevent thawing them from any incidents, including the catastrophic 2011 Tohoku earthquake. The cryogenically homogenized powdered livers will be stored in a cryogenic environment in liquid nitrogen vapor containers at -160 °C and will be analyzed when new pollutants are identified in the future.