Collections

Taxonomic Collections:

Hopkins Marine Station, along with Stanford University, divested itself of most of its taxonomic collections.

Phycological Collections:

Red Alga SpecimenThe seaweeds that grow along the Monterey Peninsula are incredibly lush and diverse. After more than 80 years of marine botanical research at Hopkins Marine Station, the Gilbert M. Smith Herbarium (GMS) remains an important resource for phycological studies. GMS maintains hundreds of important algal specimens collected at or near their type localities. Type specimens have been transferred to the Smithsonian, and the Stanford's Dudley Herbarium collection collection was transferred to University of California, Berkeley. However, many of the algal pressings examined and illustrated by Drs. Isabella A. Abbott and George J. Hollenberg for their seminal book Marine Algae of California can still be found at Hopkins. A complete inventory of this historic collection is now online. Dr. Kathy Ann Miller maintains a list of current names of California seaweed species whose names have changed since the publication of Marine Algae of California.

The Gilbert M. Smith specimens have been digitized and can be viewed at the Macroalgal Herbarium portal:

http://macroalgae.org/portal/index.php

Kathy Ann Miller was responsible for getting the specimens digitized and included in an NSF funded Macroalgae Digitization Project.

Invertebrate Collections:

Dr. Donald P. Abbott's tunicate specimens were transferred to the California Academy of Sciences. The remaining invertebrate collection contains a number of historically interesting specimens from the Albatross Expedition to the NE Pacific in the early 1900's, numerous local specimens collected by George MacGinitie in the 20's and 30's, three or four specimens purchased from Ed Ricketts’ Pacific Biological Laboratories (still with his tags), a cnidarian specimen collected by Ricketts (with tag), and several from the Antarctic and the Te Vega expeditions. The only specimens disposed of were those that had deteriorated or been used repeatedly as dissections in classes and common local animals that had no ID tags, etc. The collection now includes mostly local species, with an eclectic mix of exotics from various locations around the world -- people must have sent or brought back things for Dr. Abbott from those places.

Ichthyology Collections:

The George Vanderbilt Foundation ichthyology collection was acquired by the California Academy of Sciences in 1967 through funds provided by NSF. The main Stanford collections followed in 1969.  At the time of the transfers, the Stanford ichthyology collections contained about 75,000 lots with 750,000 to 1,000,000 specimens.  Of these, about 1,900 were type specimens.