FishBase is a

global species database A Global Species Database (GSD) is a digital catalog of organisms often defined around a conservation purpose for the organisms of interest. GSDs attempt to be globally inclusive of species within their inclusion parameters versus local species dat ...

fish Fish are aquatic, craniate, gill-bearing animals that lack limbs with digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish as well as various extinct related groups. Approximately 95% of li ...

species (specifically finfish). It is the largest and most extensively accessed online database on adult finfish on the web.Marine Fellow: Rainer Froese
''Pew Environment Group''. Over time it has "evolved into a dynamic and versatile ecological tool" that is widely cited in scholarly publications. FishBase provides comprehensive species data, including information on

taxonomy Taxonomy is the practice and science of categorization or classification. A taxonomy (or taxonomical classification) is a scheme of classification, especially a hierarchical classification, in which things are organized into groups or types. ...

, geographical distribution,

biometrics Biometrics are body measurements and calculations related to human characteristics. Biometric authentication (or realistic authentication) is used in computer science as a form of identification and access control. It is also used to identify i ...

and

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines * Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts * Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...

, behaviour and habitats, ecology and population dynamics as well as reproductive, metabolic and genetic data. There is access to tools such as trophic pyramids,

identification key In biology, an identification key, taxonomic key, or biological key is a printed or computer-aided device that aids the identification of biological entities, such as plants, animals, fossils, microorganisms, and pollen grains. Identification ke ...

s, biogeographical modelling and fishery statistics and there are direct species level links to information in other databases such as

LarvalBase LarvalBase is a global online database of information about fish eggs, larvae and fry. It includes detailed data on the identification of very young fish and the rearing of fish species important for fisheries and aquaculture. , it included de ...

GenBank The GenBank sequence database is an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations. It is produced and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI; a part ...

, the

IUCN Red List The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, also known as the IUCN Red List or Red Data Book, founded in 1964, is the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biol ...

and the

Catalog of Fishes Catalog of Fishes is a comprehensive on-line database and reference work on the scientific names of fish species and genera. It is global in its scope and is hosted by the California Academy of Sciences. It has been compiled and is continuously up ...

. , FishBase included descriptions of 35,000

species In biology, a species is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate s ...

and subspecies, with 325,700

common name In biology, a common name of a taxon or organism (also known as a vernacular name, English name, colloquial name, country name, popular name, or farmer's name) is a name that is based on the normal language of everyday life; and is often contrast ...

s, 61,700 pictures, and references to 59,200 works in the

scientific literature : ''For a broader class of literature, see Academic publishing.'' Scientific literature comprises scholarly publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences. Within an academic field, scie ...

. The site has about 700,000 visits per month.

History

The origins of FishBase go back to the 1970s, when the fisheries scientist

Daniel Pauly Daniel Pauly is a French-born marine biologist, well known for his work in studying human impacts on global fisheries and in 2020 was the most cited fisheries scientist in the world. He is a professor and the project leader of the Sea Around Us ...

found himself struggling to test a hypothesis on how the growing ability of fish was affected by the size of their gills.Bakun A (2011
"The oxygen constraint"
Pages 11–23. In: Villy Christensen and Jay Maclean (Eds.) ''Ecosystem Approaches to Fisheries: A Global Perspective'', Cambridge University Press. . Hypotheses, such as this one, could be tested only if large amounts of empirical data were available.Palomares MLD and Bailly N (2011
"Organizing and disseminating marine biodiversity information: the Fishbase and SeaLifeBase story"
Pages 24–46. In: Villy Christensen and Jay Maclean (Eds.) ''Ecosystem Approaches to Fisheries: A Global Perspective'', Cambridge University Press. . At the time,

fisheries management The goal of fisheries management is to produce sustainable biological, environmental and socioeconomic benefits from renewable aquatic resources. Wild fisheries are classified as renewable when the organisms of interest (e.g., fish, shellfish, ...

used analytical models which required estimates for fish growth and mortality. It can be difficult for

fishery scientist Fisheries science is the academic discipline of managing and understanding fisheries. It is a multidisciplinary science, which draws on the disciplines of limnology, oceanography, freshwater biology, marine biology, meteorology, conservation, ...

s and managers to get the information they need on the species that concern them, because the relevant facts can be scattered across and buried in numerous journal articles, reports, newsletters and other sources. It can be particularly difficult for people in developing countries who need such information. Pauly believed that the only practical way fisheries managers could access the volume of data they needed was to assemble and consolidate all the data available in the published literature into some central and easily accessed repository.LarvalBase: A Global Information System on Fish Larvae
''American Fisheries Society'', Early Life History Section Newsletter, May 2002, 23(2): 7–9. Such a database would be particularly useful if the data has also been standardised and validated. This would mean that when scientists or managers need to test a new hypothesis, the available data will already be there in a validated and accessible form, and there will be no need to create a new dataset and then have to validate it. Pauly recruited

Rainer Froese Rainer Froese (born 25 August 1950 in Wismar, East Germany) is a senior scientist at the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research (GEOMAR) in Kiel, formerly the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR), and a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation ...

, and the beginnings of a software database along these lines was encoded in 1988. This database, initially confined to tropical fish, became the prototype for FishBase. FishBase was subsequently extended to cover all finfish, and was launched on the Web in August 1996. It is now the largest and most accessed online database for fish in the world. In 1995 the first

CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both comput ...

was released as "FishBase 100". Subsequent CDs have been released annually. The software runs on

Microsoft Access Microsoft Access is a database management system (DBMS) from Microsoft that combines the relational Access Database Engine (ACE) with a graphical user interface and software-development tools (not to be confused with the old Microsoft Access ...

which operates only on

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

. FishBase covers adult finfish, but does not detail the early and juvenile stages of fish. In 1999 a complementary database, called

, went online under the supervision of Bernd Ueberschär. It covers

ichthyoplankton Ichthyoplankton (from Greek: ἰχθύς, , "fish"; and πλαγκτός, , "drifter") are the eggs and larvae of fish. They are mostly found in the sunlit zone of the water column, less than 200 metres deep, which is sometimes called the epi ...

and the juvenile stage of fishes, with detailed data on fish

eggs Humans and human ancestors have scavenged and eaten animal eggs for millions of years. Humans in Southeast Asia had domesticated chickens and harvested their eggs for food by 1,500 BCE. The most widely consumed eggs are those of fowl, especial ...

and

larva A larva (; plural larvae ) is a distinct juvenile form many animals undergo before metamorphosis into adults. Animals with indirect development such as insects, amphibians, or cnidarians typically have a larval phase of their life cycle. The ...

e, fish identification, as well as data relevant to the rearing of young fish in

aquaculture Aquaculture (less commonly spelled aquiculture), also known as aquafarming, is the controlled cultivation ("farming") of aquatic organisms such as fish, crustaceans, mollusks, algae and other organisms of value such as aquatic plants (e.g. lot ...

. Given FishBase's success, there was a demand for a database covering forms of aquatic life other than finfish. This resulted, in 2006, in the birth of SeaLifeBase. The long-term goal of SeaLifeBase is to develop an information system modelled on FishBase, but including all forms of aquatic life, both marine and freshwater, apart from the finfish which FishBase specialises in. Altogether, there are about 300,000 known species in this category.SeaLifeBase – home page
. Retrieved 21 July 2011.

Current organization

As awareness of FishBase has grown among fish specialists, it has attracted over 2,310 contributors and collaborators. Since 2000 FishBase has been supervised by a consortium of nine international institutions. To date, the FishBase consortium has grown to twelve members. The GEOMAR – Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research for Ocean Research Kiel (GEOMAR) in Germany, functions as the coordinating body.

References

External links

The Fish Database of Taiwan

FishBase for Africa

FishBase FishBlog (FishBase Sverige informerar)

''Science newsline'', 3 September 2010.
Rainer Froese on FishBase
''Blue Zoo''.
SpeciesBank: Dreams and realities
Rainer Froese, Workshop presentation, 2005.
Fish Morphology and Identification in FishBase
''Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA Tervuren)'', Presentation at FishBase and Fish Taxonomy Training Session 2007.
The 6th FishBase Consortium meeting and 3rd Mini FishBase Symposium
''FishBytes'', 2005.

''

Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences The Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences (CAFS) (; Pinyin: Zhōngguó shuǐchǎn Kēxuéyánjiūyuàn) is a large fisheries research institute. It was founded in 1978 under the Ministry of Agriculture in the People's Republic of China. It is a lea ...

'', 2 September 2008.
Fish on line
Daniel Pauly, Rainer Froese and Maria Lourdes Palomares. A draft guide to learning and teaching ichthyology using the FishBase information system. Updated 17 January 2005. {{Fishery science topics, expanded=science Ichthyology Online databases Biological databases Fisheries databases Biology websites Multilingual websites

History

Current organization

See also

References

Further reading

External links