Willy Bemis spends some of his time as a fish. He indulges this piscine alter ego, imagining the shadowy underworld of life under water, where fish live in a fluid state that humans find alien and rather frightening. He gets in the heads of fishes, and finds that the senses they use are not the five we are accustomed to, but instead involve various mechanisms for sensing the pressure changes and wave movements of water. The visual world is different, temperature and dehydration are not the same kind of concerns. He reckons the psychology, the gestalt, the zen of fishiness. Don't see the fish, be the fish.

Willy Bemis - world-class ichthyologist, UMass biology professor, co-author (with Lance Grande) of a 690-page epic text called A Comprehensive Phylogenetic Study of Amiid Fishes (Amiidae) Based on Comparative Skeletal Anatomy, and director of the University's biological collections - wants to tell the whole story. It's a long story; there are 50,000 vertebrates alive today, and half are fishes. He wants to know the whole context of his field, from the distant past of the fossil record to the present, so he can come closer to understanding the Big Picture, be able to show it to people, and train students about the total diversity that's out there.

"There's a tremendous satisfaction behind assembling a collection of books or biological specimens or related objects that tells a complete story," says Bemis about the lifelong passion of his career. Bemis is a collector, and everything he collects has the same ultimate aim. At UMass this includes his long-term dream: housing the University's priceless collections of fossil mammals, marine mammals, fishes, invertebrates, insects, and amphibians and reptiles in a natural history museum that would embody the very essence of a land-grant education - teaching, research, and outreach.

In his capacity as director of the biological collections, Bemis represents those scientists who systematize biology by undertaking the "messy, dirty, time-intensive" business of collecting whole organisms and then observing and classifying them. While academics tend to pursue narrow specialties, some scientists must look at the larger context that ties the bits of specialized knowledge together, must systematically study the differences among species to get at the whole.

"It's worthless to focus on the snail darter or the short-nosed sturgeon if you don't understand the context of these fish within the complete diversity of their groups," says Bemis. "And I want to make sure that people who understand that context are around in 20 or 30 years."

Currently, Bemis is working on dovetailing collections of fossil fishes and living fishes, since the study of each reinforces the knowledge and understanding gained from the other. The fossils, about 55 million years old, come primarily from the Green River Formation in western Wyoming, an ideal place for teaching students about fossil hunting as well as a rich source for collecting. He brings home skeletons of contemporary specimens from the three-day annual Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo, asking for them at the weigh-in counter and dissecting and preserving them at an outdoor lab nearby.

In a very real way, Bemis has inherited his collector's nature. By his own admission, he had "an outrageously supportive" family environment for collecting anything and everything. His father's philosophy - that you never went anywhere without a purpose - took the family on long summer vacations to Florida collecting shells, to Minnesota collecting insects, to Utah collecting fossils, and to Arizona collecting Navaho blankets.