By Daniel Pauly, Rainer Froese and Nicolas Bailly
The Quantitative Aquatics and Sea Around Us teams lament the passing of W.N ‘Bill’ Eschmeyer (1939-2024), the founding editor and namesake of the Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes (ECoF).
Born in Knoxville, USA, Eschmeyer studied marine biology at the University of Michigan, following the footsteps of his late father, Reuben Eschmeyer, who was the head of fisheries for the Tennessee Valley Authority.
After his undergraduate studies, he completed a doctorate at the University of Miami and, in 1967, moved to California to start his career at the California Academy of Sciences, where he spent four decades working as curator of fishes.
During his time at the Academy, Eschmeyer co-wrote the Peterson Field Guide to Pacific Coast Fishes, and over 60 scholarly articles on fish taxonomy. However – and as his obituary reads -, his “true life’s work” was creating the Catalog of Fishes (renamed in 2019 Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes) that was published as a three-volume + CD-ROM book in 1998[1], with about 10,000 original names of genera and subgenera, 53,000 original names of species, subspecies and infra-subspecific ranks, and over 16,000 references. It quickly became the taxonomic reference we know today, now that it is widely disseminated on the web.
In the following, we present personal accounts of the first encounter of the three authors with Bill Eschmeyer.
Daniel Pauly: I do not recall precisely when I first visited Bill Eschmeyer, in San Francisco, but it must have been in the early 1990s, during one of my annual visit to my in-laws, who lived on the nearby Monterey Peninsula. At the time, I was performing the role of a roving ‘Foreign Minister’ for the nascent FishBase (with Rainer Froese as the Manila-based ‘Interior Minister’). I had shortly before been shown the door of the Academy of Science in Philadelphia, which definitely didn’t want to work with us, and I was not too optimistic with regards to the more prestigious California Academy of Science.
I was introduced to Bill, and I made my pitch for FishBase, then a mix of unripe ideas wrapped in hope. He listened patiently, then he showed me his monumental Catalog of the Genera of Recent Fishes, a strong contrast to the limited content of FishBase at the time. As we chatted when later visiting the Academy’s huge collection of fish specimens, of which he was the curator, he let me know that he agreed to work with us. Then, he took me to the Academy’s shop, where I purchased a CD-ROM with the text of several of Charles Darwin’s books, which surprisingly provided such a large amount of material on fish that it became the foundation of my book on ‘Darwin’s Fishes.’ This was definitely a fruitful visit.
Unfortunately, I met Bill only one more time, in Vancouver, at the 2014 FishBase Symposium. If I had met him more recently, I would have thanked him for opening to FishBase the door of ‘Serious Ichthyology,’ let him know that FishBase – thanks to him and colleagues like him – is doing very well[2], and that I have become, in 2023, a Fellow of the California Academy of Science, not least because of FishBase and Darwin’s Fishes. Thus: Thank You Bill!
Rainer Froese: I first visited Bill in San Francisco shortly after Daniel secured his agreement for FishBase to use his ‘Genera of Recent Fishes‘ from a digital copy that he provided. Bill once shared the story of him as a kid playing for hours the game where you have to fit differently shaped bricks through the right holes. That is exactly what he did for most of his life with published scientific names of fishes, fixing countless errors in the process. The importance of such tedious work may be lost on young scientists, but if the scientific name attached to a piece of information is wrong, everything is wrong and – worse – misleading. Bill once mentioned that he was not satisfied if he had not “fitted” at least 100 fish names in a day. The FishBase team later produced the CD-ROM that accompanied the publication of the three volumes of the ‘Catalog of Fishes’, containing about 53,000 names for over 23,000 species. The challenge continues as over 350 new fish species are described every year, with the current count of valid species exceeding 37,000. The very much needed continuation of Bill’s work is currently done by a few senior fish taxonomists and a permanent and secure home for his work has still to be found.
Nicolas Bailly: I first met Bill Eschmeyer in the office of Jean-Claude Hureau at the Muséum national d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris (MNHN) in 1993, while he was still touring museums around the world to fix information on the type specimens of fish species. He introduced us to the Catalog of Fishes database on his laptop. At that time, I was experimenting with the appropriate database structure for fish names, with the Bregmacerotidae (codlets) as an example. I was struggling with all the issues that Bill had already faced as mentioned above by Rainer, with the worst example among the 12 codlets species at that time being Bregmaceros mcclellandi Thompson, 1840, the unicorn cod. I had found 14 different ways its name was spelled in the literature I had access to (Bailly 1994)[3], of which half are now in FishBase. Bill had already identified its correct name at that time in the first edition of the catalog (1990), which dealt primarily with genera, but also covered their type species. When I asked Bill to search for alternative spellings, he could not find them in his database. This was solved later by ‘fuzzy matching,’ which is forgiving with regard to typographical errors.
Later, when I worked with the FishBase team in the Philippines, from 2005 to 2014, I was frequently in contact with Bill. Our interactions saw ‘peaks’ and ‘troughs;’ peaks while I sent him hundreds of corrections, and also when we worked for GBIF in 2010 and sorted out 14,000 fish collection names that did not match in our databases, and troughs when FishBase failed to synchronize with ECoF, or when I created a fake name in FishBase to test how fast it would be disseminated through the web. I was surprised (or maybe not) that he was the first to detect it and he reacted strongly, blaming me for creating a nomen nudum (which still exists in ECoF as an unavailable name). As far as corrections are concerned, he blamed himself for letting so many slip by, indicating the high level of accuracy to which he held himself. I suggested that for such large databases, it is difficult to get under the 5% errors threshold unless writing thousands of lines of quality control code. But he was much below that threshold.
At the 2014 FishBase Symposium, held at the University of British Columbia, to which Bill had been invited in recognition of his huge contribution to biodiversity databases, especially FishBase, he gave a presentation of his work. The first slide documented the speed of technological evolution by listing 20 items that did not exist when he started the catalog in the 1980s, ranging from personal computers to the Internet.
Conclusion: The ichthyological community must ensure that Bill Eschmeyer’s legacy continues to shine. This will include making sure that Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes remains alive and current, a task that the dwindling number of fish taxonomists has to address.
[1] https://www.calacademy.org/scientists/catalog-of-fishes-print-version/
[2] See: Humphries, A.T., D. Dimarchopoulou, K.I. Stergiou, A.C. Tsikliras, M.L.D. Palomares, N. Bailly, C.E. Nauen, S. Luna, L.P. Banasihan, R. Froese and D. Pauly. Measuring the scientific impact of FishBase after three decades. Cybium , 47(3): 213-224.
[3] Baily N., Hureau J.-C. 1995. Base de données en biologie: quelques problèmes liés à la nomenclature et aux références bibliographiques. Cybium 19(4):333-342.
