H.J. Walker, Jr.

Abstract

T HE ASIH created the annual Spiritus award to recognize excellence in service and support of natural history collections of fishes, amphibians, and reptiles. The award alternates between disciplines from year to year with the 2022 Spiritus Award going to an ichthyologist. The winner of the 2022 Spiritus Award is H.J. Walker, Jr., retired collection manager of the Marine Vertebrate Collection at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. H.J. served as Museum Scientist/Collection Manager of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Marine Vertebrate Collection (MVC) for over 33 years. He retired in 2015 and continues to volunteer his time in the collection. During his tenure as collection manager, H.J. oversaw tremendous growth of the fish collection, including collections from around San Diego, Mexico, Taiwan, and numerous freshwater collections. H.J. also worked to accession fishes from the National Marine Fisheries Service Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, orphaned collections from the UCLA fish collection, and pelagic specimens collected by Bob Pittman across the Tropical Eastern Pacific. As one of his nominators stated, ‘‘the accessioning, identification, curation, and databasing of these newly collected and orphaned collections have made vast amounts of material available to other ichthyological researchers.’’ In collaboration with Cindy Klepadlo, H.J. was responsible for digitizing the Scripps collection in the mid 1990s, and during this time he established a vast tissue collection which has been cited in over 100 publications. In addition to his service to Scripps, H.J. coauthored Fishes: A Guide to Their Diversity and has described over a dozen species of fishes new to science from a variety of groups. He has been honored with two species of fishes named after him: the hagfish Eptetretus walkeri McMillan and Wisner 2004 and the cuskeel Bassogigas walkeri Nielsen and Møller 2011. H.J. has also been instrumental in education and outreach during his career, which all of his numerous nominators highlighted. One nominator wrote that ‘‘he enthusiastically hosted numerous research visitors to the collection facilitating their ichthyological research . . . conducted tours of the collection for school groups inspiring generations of wouldbe ichthyologists . . . [and] was a strong advocate for the importance of natural history collections to the SIO administration.’’ He has also mentored undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs. He ‘‘did everything he could to make me a better scientist, curator, and colleague . . . H.J. reached across labs and across career stages to help everyone that he met to the best of his ability,’’ wrote one of his colleagues. Natural history collections and the field of ichthyology generally have benefited greatly from H.J.’s enthusiasm, kindness, and generosity. H.J. has also dedicated his time and energy in service of the ASIH. Every ASIH meeting is livelier and more welcoming when H.J. is in attendance, which has been almost every year since his first meeting in Gainesville, Florida, in 1977. H.J. has served the Society through multiple terms on the ASIH Board of Governors, on the Editorial Board of Copeia/ Ichthyology & Herpetology, and is a member of the Joint ASIH-American Fisheries Society Committee on Common and Scientific Names of Fishes. He has been a long-time active member of the ASIH Ichthyology and Herpetology Collections Committee, and his contributions to the IHCC have been extraordinary. This award recognizes excellence in collection management, but, importantly, H.J. has been a core member of the ASIH family that makes new members feel welcome and long-term members feel at home. As a Society, we are so fortunate to have H.J. in our ranks.