News
March 11, 2013 Oregon State University Joins Network

The Oregon State Ichthyology Collection houses one of the world's most important collections of fishes from the Pacific Northwest and North Pacific, as well as smaller series of holdings from Guyana, India, Peru, Panama, Thailand, Iran, the Virgin Islands and other localities around the globe. The initial upload of 13,500 lots represents 1526 species, 265 families and 107 secondary types, and includes approximately 9500 lots from from Oregon and 4000 from beyond. Digitization of 5500 lots of mostly non-Oregonian material from the historic card catalog is underway, and these lots will become available on FishNet2 in the coming months. The earliest specimen dates to 1905, with collection beginning in earnest around 1940 and continuing to the present day.

July 30, 2012 Collaborative Georeferencing Project Funded

A FishNet collaborative georeferencing and data enhancement project titled "Georeferencing U.S. Fish Collections: a community-based model to georeferencing natural history collections" has been funded by the United States National Science Foundation. The following twelve collaborating institutions will work to expand and improve data quality within the FishNet network: Academy of Natural Sciences Philadelphia, California Academy of Sciences, Cornell University, Field Museum, Los Angeles County Museum, Tulane University, University of Florida, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Kansas, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, University of New Mexico, University of Texas at Austin. This project will result in doubling the number of and geospatially referencing records within the network, further enabling researchers to address important scientific and societal questions in areas such as endangered species conservation, environmental restoration, and global climate change.

March 01, 2012 University of Florida Joins Network

The UF Fish Collection, dating to 1917, contains 214,205 lots and 2,300,803 specimens. Included are representatives of 8,250 species from 400 families.
The collection includes 93 primary types and approximately 1,600 lots of secondary types representing 563 species. Also in the collection are 5,825 specimens of disarticulated and articulated skeletons representing 875 species. Especially notable are historic collections of large and important marine fishes as well as rapidly growing collections of freshwater fishes from Southeast Asia.
In 2006, the museum expanded its program to archive frozen tissue samples with a newly established UF Genetic Resources Collection. Tissues of fishes are stored in -20ºC freezers and number 4,150 samples of 900 species. All specimens and tissues are databased online and available for loan.

February 07, 2012 California Academy of Sciences Joins Network

The Section of Ichthyology at the California Academy of Sciences (CAS) houses one of the largest and most important research collections of its kind. There are nearly 240,000 cataloged lots (jars) containing roughly 1.5 million specimens of 509 families and nearly 12,000 species. With 1,936 primary types and 5,848 secondary types, the CAS collection is also one of the largest repositories of types in the world. The strengths of our holdings lie mainly in marine fishes of the western and central Pacific, California, and freshwater fishes from South America and southeastern Asia.
January 19, 2012 FSBC Fish Collection Joins Network

The ichthyology collection of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Institute, which uses the acronym FSBC which stands for Florida State Board of Conservation, contains more than 20,000 catalogued lots. The collection includes specimens from 13 different U. S. states and 19 different countries. The majority of the holdings of the collection are of marine and estuarine fishes from Florida.
November 15, 2011 LSU Fish Collection Joins Network

The Louisiana State University (LSU) fish collection is part of the LSU Museum of Natural Science which is one of the largest and most active natural history museums in the country. The LSUMNS is also the oldest and largest vertebrate tissue collection in the world. The Fish Section of the LSUMNS is rapidly expanding, with over 300,000 specimens in the collection. Recently collecting efforts have focused on freshwaters of Central America (El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica) and deep-sea marine forms in Asia (Taiwan, Vietnam).
September 30, 2011 TNHC Fish Collection Joins Network

The Texas Natural Science Center Ichthyology Collection at the University of Texas at Austin (TNHC), joins FishNet2. The TNHC fish collection adds data on over one million specimens collected throughout the United States, Latin & South America and Africa. Three quarters of their holdings consist of freshwater and marine groups from Texas and the Gulf of Mexico.

August 16, 2011 Legacy Search Pages Deprecated

The new and improved FishNet2 search engine has gone through sufficient testing that it is ready to serve as the primary search page for the site. We have therefore discontinued support for the older (basic & advanced) search pages.

As always, we appreciate any feedback you may have about the new site.
August 15 , 2011 UMMZ Fish Collection Joins Network

The University of Michigan Museum of Zoology Fish Collection has joined the network contributing data on approximately 3.5 million specimens.
July 01, 2011 FishNet portal gets a facelift

This update to the portal brings in some major improvements.

  • All pages have been restyled.

  • The search interface has been streamlined.

  • Spatial queries capabilities have been added.

  • A web based API now exists for programatic access to the cache. The search page uses the API and we hope to promote the development of innovative secondary clients by outside software developers. Contact us, if you are intrested in developing an application that utilizes FishNet2 web API. More details on the web API will be released soon.

This is the first in a series of upcomming improvments focusing on spatial searching, data quality and user experience.

Jan. 26, 2010 FishNet email announcement sent

FishNet partners and potential partners were notified by email on 1/26/10 of improvements to the FishNet2 portal and were presented with data sharing and data use agreements.
Jan. 26, 2010 FishNet portal ready for testing

A new version of FishNet portal was made available for testing at http://museum.tulane.edu/nelson/fishnet2
Dec. 3, 2009 New resource added

A fish tissue resource was added to the portal for the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.
Sept. 8, 2009 New partner added

University Museum of Zoology Cambridge was added to the portal.
Mar. 30, 2009 New partner added

Univeristy of New Mexico Division of Genomic resources was added to the portal.
Mar. 20, 2009 New partners added

Museum of Vertebrate Zoology - Hildebrand Collection and Western New Mexico University were added to the portal.
Mar. 10, 2009 New partner added

Yale University Peabody Museum was added to the portal.
Feb. 17, 2009 New partners added

Michigan State University Museum and University of Alaska Museum of the North were added to the portal.
Feb. 13, 2009 New partners added

Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico - IBiologia, University of Albert and University of Washington Burke Museum were added to the portal.
Feb. 6, 2009 New partners added

Austalia Museum, North Carolina State Museum and Sternberg Museum of Natural History were added to the portal.