Alaska Fisheries Science Center’s Auke Bay Laboratories (ABL)has just published a free, downloadable field guide to nearshore marine fishes. The ABL, a division of NOAA Fisheries, conducts research throughout Alaska about commercially marketable species such as rockfish, sablefish, and salmon, as well as research about all aspects of marine ecosystems. The ABL provide data to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, the NMFS Alaska regional Office, various fishing industries, state and federal regulators, and international treaty bodies.

The new field guide–aptly titled “A Handy Field Guide to the Nearshore Marine Fishes of Alaska”–is free and available as PDF download at http://www.afsc.noaa.gov/Publications/AFSC-TM/NOAA-TM-AFSC-293.pdf 

The field guide is the result extensive research conducted between 1998 and 2014 through the ABL. Written by scientists S.W. Johnson, A.D. Neff, and M.R. Lindeberg–the same research team that published  the ** in 2012–this photo-rich guide was designed as a tool to help readers “identify nearshore fishes of Alaska without going through extensive taxonomic keys” (2). The field guide is not intended to replace other field guides of fish int he region, but to supplement those guides. In particular, the field guide interacts with the NMFS online publication Atlas of Nearshore Fishes of Alaska.

FISH ON!

 

Alaska, Field Guide, fish, Fishing

By Sid

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