The Ichthyology Collection is one of the oldest and most significant fish collections in Australia, representing 150 years of acquisition from a wide variety of sources and comprising some 36 000 lots and 350 000 specimens.
It includes fishes (sharks, rays, chimaeroids, jawless and bony fishes) as well as representatives of the lancelets (primitive chordates belonging to the subphylum Cephalochordata). The collection also contains the world’s most comprehensive representation of fishes from marine, estuarine and freshwater environments of south-eastern and southern Australian waters, as well as a broad spectrum of the world’s fish fauna.
The majority of the collection is comprised of specimens in 70% alcohol, with subcollections of ethanol-fixed and frozen tissues, a larval fish collection, a dry and skeletal collection, an X-ray and photographic collection.
The collection is used for research and exhibition purposes, with the research component having increased significantly with the growth of the tissue collection.
Trout Cod, Maccullochella macquariensis, collected by Wilhelm Blandowski.
Image: Michelle McFarlane
Source: Museum Victoria
Blandowski's collections
Some of the earliest Victorian specimens in the Ichthyology Collection were collected in 1857 by Wilhelm Blandowski during the museum’s first expedition to the River Murray.
The Dorab Wolf Herring, Neosudis vorax, named in 1873 by Francois Laporte, Count Castelnau, French Consul in Melbourne from 1862-1880. This species belongs to the wolf herring family and is now known as Chirocentrus dorab.
Image: John Broomfield
Source: Museum Victoria
The Castelnau Collection
The Castelnau Collection was acquired during the 1870s. Count François L. de Laporte de Castelnau was French Consul in Melbourne from 1862-1880, and was Victoria's only ichthyologist during the colonial years. Although the majority of Castelnau material went to Paris, the museum retained a small collection, most of which are type specimens.