Aquatic Zoology collection

The Crustacean Collection of the Western Australian Museum comprises marine, freshwater and terrestrial animals, which total over 103,000 specimens.

Crustaceans are part of the phylum Arthropoda, which are invertebrates with a hard outer skeleton (cuticle) and jointed legs. This group includes animals such as spiders, scorpions, ticks, mites, centipedes, millipedes and of course crustaceans such as lobsters, crabs, prawns and barnacles.

The Western Australian Museum's Fish Collection comprises 175,000 specimens from 319 different families.

Fish specimens have been collected since 1896 – only five years after the Western Australian Museum (then Perth Museum) was established. A separate fish section was established in 1970.

From 1912 hand-written records of fish specimens have been kept, with some of the oldest documented specimens being a seadragon from Bunbury and a pygmy perch from the Vasse River, Busselton.

The Western Australian Museum’s Marine Invertebrates Section comprises specimens from many aquatic animals including Cnidaria, ascidians, Bryozoa, Brachiopoda, ctenophores, Foraminifera and others!

Although all aquatic groups are collected and studied, this collection mainly focuses on Porifera (sponges), echinoderms (e.g. sea stars) and scleractinian (hard) corals.

The Marine Invertebrates Collection comprises approximately 63,000 specimens, covering eleven different phyla.

The Western Australian Museum's Mollusc Collection represents molluscs collected from Western Australia, other parts of Australia, and from the wider world. The collection consists of approximately 300,000 lots.

Molluscs are typically soft-bodied, unsegemented invertebrates that possess an anterior head (at the front of the body), a muscular ventral foot (located near the abdomen) which is used to move, with their organs (visceral mass) located at the back of the body and covered by a fleshy mantle.

The Western Australian Museum’s Worm Collection comprises specimens from a wide range of unrelated animals commonly referred to as worms owing to their generally long and skinny bodies. There are approximately 42,000 specimens in the collection.

The collection includes commonly encountered and well known groups of worms' such as annelids like earthworms, leeches and tube worms, as well as lesser known groups such as the peanut worms (Sipuncula), innkeeper worms (Echiura) and ribbon worms (Nemertea).