Collections

The Museum's polychaete collection represents one of the world's most important repositories for this group of organisms. With over 200,000 containers holding several million specimens, the collection maintains the most comprehensive coverage of eastern Pacific polychaete species in the world. Because of its world-class status, the collection receives near-constant use by marine biologists from the west coast, and specimens are routinely loaned to specialists all over the world.

Special Strengths

• Unparalleled in breadth of coverage of eastern Pacific habitats, both in terms of depth (inter-tidal to abyssal) and volume of readily available material; the museum's holdings of polychaete worms represent the major source of material for all monographic work on the group in the eastern Pacific.

• World-wide representation especially from Indian, Pacific, and Antarctic Oceans.

• Numerous environmental survey collections over the past 40 years in a range of depths along Oregon, California, and Mexico.

• The collection is an on-going fundamental resource for most of the environmental agencies along the west coast of North America.

• The collections are historically vital to the important conservation biology, biodiversity, and environmental assessment issues, especially in the eastern Pacific.