LSU Curation of the Collection of Fishes

The Fish Section of the Louisiana State Museum of Natural Science was founded in 1979 by Curator J. Michael Fitzsimmons who oversaw the collection until 2006 when he retired. In 2008, Prosanta Chakrabarty was hired to take over the collections as Curator.

The Fish Section has undergone some drastic changes since 2008. A complete remodeling of the Gym Armory collections including major mold removal, painting and the addition of humidity and temperature control. All of the 15,000+ lots (jars of specimens) were reorganized and cleaned. The grand reopening took place in January of 2012. Another major renovation from 2018-2020 was funded by an NSF Collections Improvement Grant, and moved the collections to the main research building of the Museum of Natural Science in Foster Hall. This work included renovating a large space in Foster Hall with modern compactor shelving and tank racks. Major support also came from the College of Science.

The collections include over 350K specimens in 30K lots. It also includes over 10,000 fish tissue samples (one of the largest such collections representing more than 2000 species). The collections are rapidly expanding and currently contain representative samples from all major groups of living fishes. The holdings include those from Louisiana and the northern Gulf of Mexico, but focus on international collections not housed in other Southeastern museum collections. These include fishes from Central and South America, and from throughout the Indo-West Pacfic (over 50 countries are represented). More than 200 research papers, theses, and dissertations have been based wholly, or in part, on the collection of fishes. Thirty-nine graduate students (18 M.S. and 21 Ph.D.) completed degree programs with research based wholly, or in part, on the museum's fish collection. The holdings of the LSUMNS Ichthyology section database is freely available on-line via FishNET2 (search under LSUMZ). The collections are also searchable in VertNET, iDigBio and GBIF. 

Much of the physical renovations and digitization work was done by students including Caleb McMahan, Bill Ludt, Pam Hart, Diego Elias, Link Morgan and Collection Managers Seth Parker. In 2021 we hired a new Collections Manager, David Boyd, who will oversee remaining renovations, maintenance and growth of the LSU MNS Fish collections with Curator Chakrabarty.