William "Bill" N Eschmeyer

Bill Eschmeyer was born in 1939 in Knoxville, TN to Reuben and Ruth Eschmeyer. He spent his early years in Norris, TN where his father was the head of fisheries for the Tennessee Valley Authority, a major project of the New Deal. After Reuben suffered a fatal heart attack in 1955, Bill’s mother moved Bill and his two sisters to Maryland. Ruth raised her three children as a single mother, working full time to put all three of her children through college. Bill spent his undergrad years at the University of Michigan where he followed in his father’s footsteps to pursue a degree in marine biology. He went on to complete his doctorate at the University of Miami. In 1967, he married and moved to California, where he began his career with the California Academy of Sciences. He spent 40 years at the Academy as curator of fishes.

During his career, Bill co-wrote a popular book on fish, the Peterson Field Guide to Pacific Coast Fishes, and a total of 61 scholarly articles on fish taxonomy, but his true life’s work was creating the worldwide fish database known as the Catalog of Fishes, first published in 1990. It is difficult to underestimate the Catalog’s importance for Ichthyology, as it is the resource that everyone relies on in the field and is unique in being the only such database for vertebrate animals. For his work in systematics, Bill was awarded two lifetime achievement awards. The first was the Bleeker Award for Excellence in Indo-Pacific Ichthyology in 2009 for a “lifetime distinguished accomplishments and great contributions in the study of fish systematics in the Indo-Pacific region.” In 2019, he was awarded the Joseph S. Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award in Ichthyology from the American Academy of Ichthyologists and herpetologists. The California Academy of Sciences renamed the Catalog to Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes in 2019. 

Bill was especially proud that he visited every museum in the world that held a collection with type specimens (the original specimens used when describing new species). He traveled to 6 continents and well over 100 countries. He enjoyed sharing the world with his three children. He took his younger daughter on a 6-week research trip to Europe while she was in college, and later, he took all his children and their partners on several international adventures, including a memorable trip to Tahiti in 1999.

Outside of work, Bill was an avid golfer, and he even returned to Tennessee to live on a golf course for several years in the early 2000s before neuropathy in his hand forced him to give up golf for good. But the thing that he never wanted to give up was the Catalog of Fishes. In 2011, well after his official retirement, he moved to Gainesville, FL where the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida gave him an office and a computer and the title of research associate. He continued to work on keeping the Catalog updated until 2018, when his health challenges made the work too difficult. Colleagues continue to keep the Catalog up to date and it continues to be hosted by the California Academy of Sciences. 

Bill moved to Massachusetts in 2018 to spend his final years near his youngest child and his three grandchildren. He was honored to learn that his eldest granddaughter is interested in fisheries biology and spent the past summer studying salmonid diseases at the University of Maine. She was equally delighted to find her grandfather’s name referenced in a paper she was reading for her internship. 

Bill is survived by his two sisters, Barbara Richards and Jane Marrs; his children Lisa Eschmeyer and husband Mark Meehan; David Eschmeyer; and Lanea Tripp and husband Simon; as well as his three grandchildren Nora, Braden, and Elizabeth Tripp.