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 Fisheries-Oceanography Coordinated Investigations (FOCI). The site can be used to identify unknown 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 and Bering Sea. In addition, we present useful interactive links to ICLARM's FishBase and LarvalBase 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, Northeast Pacific waters off 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). More recently, a synoptic atlas presenting data on spatial and temporal trends in the dominant fish eggs and larvae from these regions has been completed (Matarese et al., 2003). These publications, in addition to recent advances in regional ichthyoplankton taxonomy (e.g., Moser, 1996; Busby, 1998) and a meta-database of ichthyoplankton 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. Users are encouraged to provide updated or new data relating to the taxa listed.
The IIS data is also available in pdf format, in our Ichthyoplankton report.
The project team for this work is Ann Matarese, Deborah Blood, Kimberly Bahl, and Małgorzata Konieczna.
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).