Dr. Peter Moyle teaching electrofishing to WFCB students.
The fish collection was started in 1972 and grew as a direct result of the research conducted by Dr. Peter B. Moyle and his graduate students. Moyle developed the collection to assist teaching and forward the completion of the classic text, Inland Fishes of California (Moyle 2002). The MWFB Ichthyology Collection is the fourth largest in the state of California. It contains 8,000 lots of fish comprising 30,000 specimens. We house four type specimens. The collection centers on inland fish of California and in this capacity it is among the most important modern collections with this emphasis in the United States. These materials are irreplaceable due to dramatic losses of California's native fish habitat. In addition to inland California, the collection emphasizes near shore species of California and Baja California. The MWFB Ichthyology collection also houses excellent collections of fish from Antarctica, Sri Lanka (again emphasizing inland species), tropical Hawaii, and other North American localities. In 2014, the San Jose State fish collection was donated to the MWFB. This was a significant donation that dove-tailed with our inland fish emphasis. The San Jose State collection was primarily of marine and estuarine species from Baja California north to Alaska. To our delight, it also housed a significant number of fish collected by Moyle while he was a graduate student at Cornell University.
