Te Papa’s Fish Team is responsible for collection, identification, registration, management, curation and researching the National Fish Collection for the nation. An active programme of collecting by museum scientists in association with exploratory fishing surveys, biodiversity surveys, and collecting by MFish Scientific Observers and recreational anglers, has more than doubled the known fish fauna of the New Zealand region from 600 to 1,300 species in the last 30 years. The number of fish species continues to grow as new areas and depths are explored and new discovered specimens are sent to the museum.
The collection from our area currently includes more than 120 new records and about half are new to science and require scientific names and formal taxonomic descriptions. Furthermore, many of our fishes including commercially important species that were originally poorly diagnosed making them difficult to accurately identify. Not all newly discovered species are found in deep water; some have been caught in shallow coastal areas and even in the intertidal.