Bishop Museum’s Natural Science Department includes a significant Ichthyology collection, begun in 1889 with a small sampling of fishes from off the west coast of North America by the US Fish Commission vessel Albatross. From that modest beginning, the current collection contains over 40,000 cataloged lots (more than 102,000 specimens) obtained from expeditions throughout the twentieth century through today. Collection holdings are from all of the major island groups and tropical regions of the Indo-Pacific. Although the primary emphasis is coral reef species, deep benthic and epipelagic fishes of the central Pacific and the freshwater native fishes of the Hawaiian Islands are also represented.