The updated checklist of the collected specimens in the Ichthyological Museum in Szczecin

Abstract

The Ichthyological Collection of the Faculty of Food Sciences and Fisheries, West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin was founded by Professor Eugeniusz Grabda at the Faculty of Fisheries, Agricultural University of Olsztyn in 1955. In 1968, the collection, with the entire faculty moved to Szczecin and immediately started to develop in the wake of the global expansion of the Polish fisheries fleet in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The main focus were the finfish, but other items represented also aquatic invertebrates, reptilians, and mammals. In the early 1980s, the exhibition halls of the museum were closed and converted to an experimental aquarium unit. The collection was gradually moved either to glass display cabinets in the hallways of the building or to the storage. After a major renovation of the building, the museum officially re-opened on 13 February 2020. The collection consists of 759 specimens with 329 dry ones, 430 formalin preserved, three specimens of tunicates, and one of cephalochordate. This paper provides the inventory list of the collection in the taxonomic arrangement of Nelson with updates from recent ichthyological publications. The most unique exhibit is a female of Acipenser oxyrinchus Mitchill, 1815  caught in 1965 in the Vistula River (next-to-last specimen captured in Poland in the wild), at present the extinct species in the Baltic Sea basin. Important items of our collection are also Salmo salar Linnaeus, 1758 breeders caught in the Drawa River in 1970, currently extinct in Poland in the wild since the 1980s.

Keywords

• museum
• collection
• fish
• ichthyology