The Hawaii Conservation Alliance: Leaders in Environmental Management, Research and Education

Bishop Museum initiated its Ichthyology collection with a small sampling from off the west coast of North America by the U.S. Fish Commission vessel Albatross in 1889, and while these specimens are no longer extant, the current collection of over 40,000 cataloged lots (more than 102,000 specimens) includes other specimens from its early history, such as Alvin Seale's South Pacific expeditions of 1900-1903.

The fish collection holds specimens of other early Pacific voyages of exploration, such as the Tanager and Whippoorwill Expeditions (1923-1924), but is dominated by the extensive collections of its most prominent ichthyologist, John E. ("Jack") Randall, who joined the Bishop Museum in 1965. Jack Randall has single-handedly established the Bishop Museum fish collection as arguably the best systematic research resource in the world for Indo-Pacific reef and shore fishes by his selective collecting for over 40 years and his prolific writings on fish systematics.

Collection holdings are from all of the major island groups and tropical regions of the Indo-Pacific. However, deep benthic and epipelagic fishes of the central Pacific and the freshwater native fishes of the Hawaiian Islands are also represented.

The Herbarium Pacificum (BISH) collection consists of approximately 600,000 plant specimens, with emphasis on Hawai‘i and the Pacific Basin, but with representative material from other regions. The collections of Hawaiian plants form the largest and most comprehensive assemblage of such specimens in the world, with approximately 182,500 specimens including some of the first plants collected by naturalists on the voyage of Captain Cook to the Hawaiian islands in 1778.

The J. Linsley Gressitt Center for Research in Entomology houses some 14 million prepared specimens of insects and related arthropods, including over 16,500 primary types, making it the third largest entomology collection in the United States and the fifth largest in the world.

Although preserving collections made throughout the world, the collection’s strength lies in its unparalleled holdings of specimens from New Guinea, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and Oceania.

Unmatched historical and modern holdings from the Hawaiian Islands document the archipelago’s highly endemic and often endangered native insect fauna as well as the large contingent of alien species that threaten it.

Entomology at the Bishop Museum can be traced back as far as 1892, beginning with the support of R.C.L. Perkins and the Fauna Hawaiiensis survey project.

The Vertebrate Zoology section includes the Bishop Museum‘s collections of mammalogy, ornithology, herpetology and paleontology specimens. The geographic focus of these collections is Hawai'i and the Pacific Basin, but with representative material from other regions. The mission is to document the non-fish vertebrate fauna of the region through the collection of specimens, to preserve these specimens through time, and make them available to scientists, students, artists and all interested persons through loans and supervised use at the museum.

Mammalogy: The mammal collection currently numbers 15,500 specimens. The Hawai‘i component is small (ca. 900) but the New Guinea component of approx. 12,000 is substantial, and is one of only two major New Guinea mammal collections in the United States (the American Museum of Natural History houses the other).

Ornithology: The bird collection currently numbers 20,600 specimens. The Hawai‘i component of ca. 7,200 specimens is unique in the world in having representatives of most of the 289 species known to have occurred in the Hawaiian archipelago since first western contact in 1778, and in continuing to obtain legally salvaged or collected native birds to the present day. The Hawai‘i component contains specimens of extinct native species, native breeding species, non-breeding visitors, and introduced species. In addition, the collection houses 5,900 specimens from New Guinea, and is an important world resource for birds from this region.

Herpetology: The reptile and amphibian collection currently has ca. 17,000 cataloged specimens with another ca. 15,000 in backlog. The Hawai‘i component of 1,300 specimens is particularly concerned with documenting the occurrence and spread of alien species. The Bishop Museum has played an important and active part in documenting the introduction and establishment of new species of lizards and frogs over the last 10 years. The ca. 10,000 strong collection of New Guinea reptiles and amphibians is our fastest growing collection at the moment with two researchers actively working in Papua New Guinea.

Paleontology: This collection consists of ca. 30,000 cataloged and 10,000 backlogged specimens of sub-fossil bird bones, mostly from Hawai‘i, but also from other areas of the Pacific. Most of the material is presently out on loan to the Smithsonian Institution where experts are continuing to identify and describe new species that lived and became extinct in Hawai‘i long before western contact. Bishop Museum and the Smithsonian Institution are the only two institutions with collections of ancient bird bones from Hawai‘i.

The Invertebrate Zoology collection at the Bishop Museum contains nearly 25,000 cataloged lots with a few thousand more lots of uncataloged material, most primarily from marine environments. Our staff are engaged in ongoing research throughout Hawai‘i and the Pacific including recent surveys of Hawaii’s harbors for invasive organisms and the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands to provide a complete checklist of all marine invertebrates