Description
The Vantuna Research Group’s (VRG) fish collection, now integrated into the Moore Laboratory of Zoology collection, is located at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. The fish collection totals nearly 600,000 specimens and includes whole organisms (>20,000), larvae (>550,000), tissue samples (6,236), otoliths (19,458), gonads (676), and vertebrae (126). The collection was established by Dr. John S. Stephens in 1960. Stephens and his mentee, Dr. Dan Pondella, the current VRG Director, worked together on rocky-reef fishes of the eastern Pacific. Stephens described the family of Chaenopsidae and Pondella specialized in phylogenetic systematics of bass and groupers. The vast majority of the collection’s specimens are from the Southern California Bight and together encompass the full spatial extent of the southern California rocky reef ecosystem. Taxonomic strengths of the collection, excluding larvae specimens, include Sciaenidae (13,765), Atherinopsidae (3,199), Sebastidae (1,740), Embiotocidae (1,628), and Serranidae (837). Most of the larvae specimens were collected as part of an ongoing study and represent over 45 years of monthly collections—this is one of the largest and longest time-series collections of nearshore fish larvae in the region. Taxonomic strengths of this larvae collection include Gobiidae (166,507), Blenniidae (130,666), Pomacentridae (83,558), and Labrisomidae (52,767).
Data Records
The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 42,599 records.
1 extension data tables also exist. An extension record supplies extra information about a core record. The number of records in each extension data table is illustrated below.
- Occurrence (core)
- Multimedia
This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.
Downloads
Download the latest version of this resource data as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) or the resource metadata as EML or RTF:
Versions
The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.
How to cite
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
Moore Laboratory of Zoology, Vantuna Research Group (Arctos)
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is Moore Laboratory of Zoology. To the extent possible under law, the publisher has waived all rights to these data and has dedicated them to the Public Domain (CC0 1.0). Users may copy, modify, distribute and use the work, including for commercial purposes, without restriction.
GBIF Registration
This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 415cdd20-b2a4-45b1-8918-b6a4bf188ffe. Moore Laboratory of Zoology publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by U.S. Geological Survey.
Keywords
Occurrence; Specimen; Occurrence
Contacts
Who created the resource:
Who can answer questions about the resource:
Who filled in the metadata:
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Geographic Coverage
The collection has global coverage. The vast majority of the specimens in the collection are from the Southern California Bight and together encompass the full spatial extent of the southern California rocky reef ecosystem.
| Bounding Coordinates | South West [-90, -180], North East [90, 180] |
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Taxonomic Coverage
No Description available
| Class | Actinopterygii, Chondrichthyes, Petromyzontida, Myxini, Sarcopterygii, Leptocardii |
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Temporal Coverage
| Start Date / End Date | 1938-01-01 / 2021-01-01 |
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Additional Metadata
http://vertnet.org/resources/norms.html; Arctos Data Ownership and Use: http://arctosdb.org/home/data/
| Alternative Identifiers | 415cdd20-b2a4-45b1-8918-b6a4bf188ffe |
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| http://ipt.vertnet.org:8080/ipt/resource?r=mlz_fish |