Alaska Ichthyoplankton Information System Database

This is an interactive research tool, providing one-stop shopping for information about ichthyoplankton of the Northeast Pacific and Arctic. Updates are made on a yearly basis; a lag time of six years is applied to distributional data.

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 Ecosystem & 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, Bering Sea, Chukchi Sea, and Beaufort Sea. In addition, we present useful interactive links to ICLARM's 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, 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 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 and 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.