Welcome to the Northeast Pacific Ichthyoplankton Information System (IIS). This site allows the user to access data on the early life history of fishes collected by the Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC) Recruitment Processes Program, which includes Ecosystems & Fisheries-Oceanography Coordinated Investigations (Eco-FOCI). The site can be used to either identify fish eggs and larvae by using known data such as meristics, distribution, and illustrations of developmental stages or as a source of original data on the early life history stages of fishes of the Northeast Pacific Ocean, which includes the large marine ecosystems of the U.S. West Coast, the Gulf of Alaska, the southeastern Bering Sea, and the U.S. Arctic (Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea). In addition, we present useful interactive links to the International Center for Living Aquatic Resources Management's (ICLARM) FishBase and the University of Washington's Fish Collection Archive.
Since the 1960's the Recruitment Processes Program at AFSC has been collecting and identifying fish eggs and larvae from the Bering Sea, the Arctic (Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea), Northeast Pacific waters off Alaska (Gulf of Alaska), and the coastal waters off Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. A taxonomic guide to the early life history stages of the more than 200 fishes that spawn in these areas was published in 1989 (Matarese et al., 1989). In 2003, a synoptic atlas presenting data on spatial and temporal trends in the dominant fish eggs and larvae from these regions was completed (Matarese et al., 2003). These publications, in addition to advances in regional ichthyoplankton taxonomy (e.g., Moser, 1996; Busby, 1998) and a meta-database of EcoFOCI cruise data, have been brought together here to provide a wealth of information not available anywhere else. The IIS site integrates these sources into an interactive research tool, providing a one-stop shopping area for information about ichthyoplankton of the Northeast Pacific and U.S. Arctic. Updates are made on a yearly basis; a lag time of six years is applied to distributional data. Users are encouraged to provide updated or new data relating to the taxa listed.
The current update was completed Summer 2021 and includes 1972 – 2015 distributional data.
The IIS data are also available in pdf format, in our Ichthyoplankton report. Please note that the full Ichthyoplankton report has not been updated since 2015 due to technical difficulties. However, you are still able to download updated species profiles as pdfs to augment the Ichthyoplankton report. Thank you for your understanding as we work to address this issue.
The project team for this work is Alison Deary, Kimberly Bahl, Małgorzata Adamus, Małgorzata Konieczna, Ann Matarese, and Deborah Blood.
Due to the large amount of information included on the taxon information pages, this site is best viewed at full screen and high resolution (1024 x 768 or greater).
Please cite this website:
Ichthyoplankton Information System. June 14, 2021. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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[<https://apps-afsc.fisheries.noaa.gov/ichthyo/index.php>].