For well over a year, Florida Museum scientists and ichthyologists have been working on a new book—a guide to the freshwater fishes of Florida. It might never outsell The DaVinci Code and be made into a blockbuster movie, but it is going to be remarkable.

You see, most scientific fish photos are of dead specimens, and there’s a vast difference between living and dead fish. Not just for the fish themselves.

So our intrepid team has been paddling and wading through the many waterways of Florida to catch and photograph live fish. The pictures are significantly different than previous fish guides, even though the system of photographing them is challenging. You can read more about this elsewhere though.

My reason for bringing this up isn’t just that we’ve improved our methods for cataloging and conveying scientific information. Times have changed, and our old Florida fishes guide book is out of date. It’s actually the ‘Guide to Reptiles, Amphibians and Fresh-water Fishes of Florida’ (by Archie Carr and Coleman Goin. University of Florida Press, 1955). Yes, go back and read that—1955.

So besides the fact that the old book is mostly text with a few illustrations and photos, and we know much more about the fishes in the state, and we now have a new range of non-native species to deal with—the whole world has change a LOT since 1955. Especially the scientific world. And women in the scientific world.

This is an excerpt from the book’s preface to remind you how far we have come in the scientific community:

“Of all of our debts, our greatest one we owe is to Olive Brown Goin. There is no real justice in her exclusion from co-authorship, unless it be the already overlong citation our title will impose on bibliographers of the future. Mrs. Goin has typed every part of the manuscript through at least two stages of development, copying at times from atrocious hand script, and has had a hand in nearly every phase of the assembling and tending of the manuscript through the press. Mrs. Carr has been helpful too, but her services have been pretty much what you expect of a wife; indexing, testing keys, making coffee—things like that. We are grateful for them both, but we really must apologize to Mrs. Goin for leaving her name off the title page.”

I’m sure Archie and Coleman deeply appreciated the many hours of help their wives gave towards their work. But this was a different world. Women struggled for the right to be considered scientists. Especially here in the Southern US. Can you imagine Olive’s life if she was starting out a career today? It’s not all sunshine and rainbows yet, but you can believe her name would be right there on the books and papers with her peers.

Not to harp on life in the ‘50s scientific community. But it IS a different world now. Different for women and fishes. So it’s about time for a new book.