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FishBase is a comprehensive database of information about fish. As of October 2006, it included descriptions of over 29,400 species, over 222,300 common names in hundreds of languages, over 42,600 pictures, and references to more than 38,600 works in the scientific literature.

Contents 1 Overview 2 See also 3 References 4 External links

In 1987, Daniel Pauly, inspired by the Species Identification Sheets and other products of Walter Fischer for the Food and Agriculture Organization in the 1970s, proposed a standardized database for fish species, as a part of the "ICLARM Software Project". The following year, he began to work with Rainer Froese, who had been working on an expert system to identify fish larvae. After an abortive attempt to build a system using Prolog, Froese switched to DataEase, a relational database for DOS. In 1989 the project received its first grant.

In 1993 the project switched to Microsoft Access, and 1995 the first CD-ROM was released as "FishBase 100". Its initial reviews in scientific journals lauded the scope but criticized the many gaps in coverage. Subsequent CD releases have come close to annually, with the FishBase 2004 release needing five CDs, or one DVD. The software needs Windows 98 or later, and is not available on any other computer platform such as Mac OS X or Linux.

FishBase first appeared on the World Wide Web in August 1996, and a webmaster was hired in the following year. Eventually, the complete data of the CDs became available online.

Since the year 2000, FishBase has been run by the FishBase Consortium. The consortium consists of (in alphabetical order):

• Africamuseum, Tervuren
• Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thesaloniki
• Fisheries Centre University of British Columbia, Vancouver
• Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome
• IFM-GEOMAR, Kiel
• Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris
• Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm
• WorldFish Center, Penang

As awareness of FishBase has grown among fish specialists, it has attracted some 1370 contributors and collaborators. In order to preserve its value as a scientific database, FishBase is not allowed to include original data; all of its content must be based on previously-published material.

• For early roots and possible future extensions see the German page.

Mirror sites:
[1] - DE
[2] - SE
[3] - US

• Froese, R. and D. Pauly, Editors. FishBase 2000: concepts, design and data sources (ICLARM, Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines, 2000)

• FishBase online