The fish collection of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) traces its origin within the extinct Instituto de Ci\u00eancias Naturais (ICN), by that time a department attached to the university. For this early period, little information about its operation can be recovered, but the first fish specimens cataloged in the present collection indeed came from the general zoological collection of that institute. In 1978, the few fish holdings of that collection were transferred to the Department of Zoology under the care of Leda F. A. Jardim and her undergraduate student Paulo A. Buckup, who acted as responsible for the collection up to 1982. One year later (1979), the undergraduate student Luiz R. Malabarba joined the group working in the fish collection, being officially hired in 1983 as Professor and curator, a position that maintains until today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The collection participated in the NEODAT I and NEODAT II projects of creation of an Inter-Institutional Database of Fish Biodiversity in the Neotropics, being fully computerized in 1994 with the Muse software. Later, the Specify platform was implemented and is still being used to date. The list of collection holdings can be consulted via SpeciesLink (splink.cria.org.br\/) since 2012 and the actual database was made available at specify.ufrgs.br (username: convidadopeixes; password: convidado) as of early 2018\/late 2017 where a folder (\u201cattachments\u201d), has just been implemented with photos of collection sites and catalogued specimens available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2001, the fish collection was transferred from the Campus Central near downtown to the Campus do Vale, along with the Department of Zoology, with a properly designed room to hold the Zoological collections. Later, with the increase of the amount of tissue samples collected for molecular studies, a second room was designed to house five freezers with the tissue collection, along with three additional freezers for processing samples prior to incorporation to the collection and\/or storing loaned tissue samples. Following its growth in size and relevance, in the recent years, the collection hired Juliana M. Wingert, as its fellow collection manager (2016 on), and in 2018 Andr\u00e9 L. Netto-Ferreira was hired as Professor and curator, acting along with L. Malabarba. The laboratory has also debuted in 2017 a research line focusing on ancient and degraded DNA, focusing both on unveiling the identity of problematic fish taxa (Silva et al., 2017), but also in employing such techniques to recognize the host of parasitic trichomycterids from DNA samples obtained directly from the parasites\u2019 digestive tract (Bonato et al., 2018). That research line also stimulated the preparation of a room dedicated to such activities and isolated from potential sources of contaminations, named ArchGen, the first Brazilian ancient DNA station so far. Among the future perspectives the collection is expected to move to a new facility, currently under construction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Current holding belonging to 1.488 species, 581 genera, 137 families, and 41 orders from all Brazilian States as well as other 20 countries being represented in the collection. The most represented orders are characiforms, but the collection includes samples from 78 orders of fish. The collection of tissue samples for DNA extraction is associated to their respective vouchers, mostly of Neotropical freshwater fishes and some marine specimens, mainly from the Brazilian coast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n