Elevator-whisperer Mia Bernt in the bowels of her building - January 18th, 2025
Turning from yesterday's exploits of two of our mammalogists and Mount Lyell shrew troubadours, who are now affiliated with the California Academy of Sciences, we segue to noted ichthyologist Bill Eschemeyer, also of the California Academy of Sciences.
By Sam Whiting, Reporter Jan 16, 2025 - San Francisco Chronicle
Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes is the definitive global source, with the Latin name for 65,000 species compiled by biologists at the California Academy of Sciences under the leadership of Bill Eschmeyer of San Anselmo, who spent 40 years on an odyssey that took him to every museum with a collection of dead fish in jars.
The database he created, which started before the internet, was still growing and being refined long after Eschmeyer retired and moved to the East Coast to be near his three adult children. He died Dec. 30 at an assisted care facility in Nashua, N.H., said his daughter, Lanea Tripp, who was named for an 18th century Swedish biologist her father admired. Eschmeyer had suffered from dementia compounded by long COVID. He was 85.
“He would walk into a museum anywhere in Europe and people would know him and welcome him to see their collections,” said Tripp, who witnessed this on an eight-country tour with her father. “He was like a science celebrity, but he was most at home in a dusty basement holding jars of fish in formaldehyde.”
The son of a fish scientist at the Tennessee Valley Authority, Eschmeyer grew up at the dam fishery. Once he’d eliminated his first choice of careers, professional golfer, he never wavered in the pursuit of his second choice, marine biologist. He was just 28 and armed with a doctorate from the University of Miami when he got his first academic job, at the Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, in 1968. It was also his last academic job.
Never one to shy away from a big project, Eschmeyer spent his first 15 years at the Academy as the lead editor of “A Field Guide to Pacific Coast Fishes,” published in 1983 under the Peterson Field Guides imprint. His frustration with gathering the proper scientific names for all the fish off the coast of California was a major impetus for him to pursue the Catalog of Fishes, a database which did not then exist.
He applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation, which was wary that such a vast undertaking could be completed.
“The NSF had doubts that building a database to document all fish names could be done, so they only awarded a three-year grant to record the genera of fishes,” said Richard Van der Laan, a retired researcher at the University of Applied Sciences in Utrecht, Netherlands. “But they hadn’t counted on the dedication, determination and enthusiasm that Bill had for the work.”
“If you imagine the collection of fishes as a library, Bill’s job was the head librarian who oversees it,” said Luiz Rocha, who succeeded Eschmeyer in that position. “The catalog of fishes would be like a list of every book that has ever been published. It is a very complex task because there are a lot of different scientific names for fish and not all of them are valid. Taxonomy keeps changing with new evidence.”
Bill Eschmeyer, developer of definitive fish catalog at Academy of Sciences, dies at 85
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