The fish collection is housed in Room 242 of Lappin Hall, along with amphibian, reptile, insect, and mammals collections. Freshwater fish holdings include contains about 2250 catalogued and 1500 uncatalogued lots, comprising 27 families, 77 genera and 261 species. There are about 400 lots of marine fishes, nearly all uncatalogued, comprising 75 families, 138 genera, and 183 species.

Geographic Area of Coverage:Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginina. Most collections are from the eastern third of Kentucky, with extensive holdings from the Licking River, Red River, Tygart's Creek, and Little Sandy River drainages. Marine fishes are primarily from the Gulf of Mexico, near the Mississippi Sound.

Taxonomic Coverage:Composition reflects the area of coverage, with the highest diversity in Percidae (78 sp.) Cyprinidae (76 sp.), Centrarchidae (20 sp.), Ictaluridae (19 sp.), and Catostomidae (17 sp.).  Highest diversity in the marine fishes occurs in the families Carangidae (10 sp.), Sciaenidae (10 sp.), Serranidae (10 sp.), and Triglidae (8 sp.).

Time Period Most fishes were collected after 1970, although we have about 200 historically valuable fishes collected by Welter in the 1930s from the Licking River drainage. The bulk of the ichthyological collection is due to the efforts of Dr. Les Meade, desceased naturalist and professor at Morehead State University. Many of the fish collections were part of class field trips during the 1970s and 1980s when Meade was the instructor for Ichthyology at Morehead State University.  In addition, we acquired and about 150 lots of fishes from the Kentucky Department of Transportation.  Most of these are rare fishes collected in the 1970s and and 1980s by S. P. Rice. Recent additions to the collection include species new or poorly represented in the collection, species of special biological interest, documentations of range extensions, and collections from regions not previously represented in the collection. Since 1997, these efforts have resulted in the addition of about 115 species new to the collection.

Storage Medium About 60% of the specimens are in 5-10% formalin. Most of the remainder are stored in 45% isopropanal; a few are in 70% ethanol. We are in the process of changing over all formalin lots to alcohol. In addition we have about 25 lots of Cleared and Stained (cartilage and bone) specimens in glycerin.

Cataloguing System The collection is stored in Morehead State University in Lappin Hall, Room 242. This room serves a multiple purpose of storage of Morehead State University's collection of wet vertebrates, research and curation space for three faculty, and as a teaching lab for several vertebrate and invertebrate courses. Freshwater fishes are shelved by family in phylogenetic order according to Nelson (2006). Genera are arranged alphabetically within each family and species are arranged alphabetically within each genus. Marine fishes are stored separately from the freshwater families and are arranged alphabetically by family.

Fishes are being catalogued with the acronym MOSU and recorded on sorting sheets, filed by alphabetically by state and county. All fishes collected after August 1997 have been catalogued. Much of the older material has not been catalogued, but we are in the process of assigning catalogue numbers to all specimens, and recording all collections on sorting sheets. As a future goal, we hope to put all of the records on a computer database.

Types Noturus fasciatus PARATYPES

Updated 15 August 2006