kbpeterc
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What are the best books, websites, and other resources for learning the names of marine life?
Learning Marine Life
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Mudd
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I have picked up two different books for identifying East Coast fish: Peterson Field Guides: Atlantic Coast Fishes by Robins, Ray & Douglass as well as A Field Guide to Coastal Fishes from Maine to Texas by Kells & Carpenter.
Of the two of these I prefer the book by Kells & Carpenter as the illustrations of the fish are far more detailed and the comments on the individual fish seem to be more focused on behavior and environment rather than describing physical characteristics. Furthermore, there is a section in the beginning that gives a general shape of the different types of fish with a brief description to help you identify the family first, and then go to the pages for the specific fish.
Of the two of these I prefer the book by Kells & Carpenter as the illustrations of the fish are far more detailed and the comments on the individual fish seem to be more focused on behavior and environment rather than describing physical characteristics. Furthermore, there is a section in the beginning that gives a general shape of the different types of fish with a brief description to help you identify the family first, and then go to the pages for the specific fish.
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These guys wrote the book(s) - literally...Paul Humann and Ned DeLoach
Reef Fish Identification Books by New World Publications
They also have an ebook app:
Reef Fish Identification ebook Tropical Pacific
There's also:
http://www.fishbase.us/search.php
Reef Fish Identification Books by New World Publications
They also have an ebook app:
Reef Fish Identification ebook Tropical Pacific
There's also:
http://www.fishbase.us/search.php
I see OP is from NC. If the is talking about NC fish, then Reef Fish, the large version has most of them. However, there is also a somewhat smaller travelers version. I find that they made it smaller by dropping several species from NC that are in the larger book.
I enjoy marine life ID but personally I am unable to sit there and just read the books at length. What works for me is on a given dive I will note a few fish I do not know the name of, try to take a few pictures of them, then look them up later. As time goes by I am learning more and more of them a few at a time. Same for invertebrates.
When I started diving the internet did not exist, I had to rely on a few books, many of which did not have sufficient information for me where I dived at the time.
As Steve_C mentions above, find some books specific to your dive area, there could be some websites too that are useful for fish and invertebrate ID for NC.
WARNING: THIS COULD LEAD YOU INTO UNDERWATER PHOTOGRAPHY AND YOUR BANK ACCOUNT MAY SUFFER OVER THE LONG TERM, LOSS OF SPOUSE AND SELLING YOUR CHILDREN COULD RESULT
As Steve_C mentions above, find some books specific to your dive area, there could be some websites too that are useful for fish and invertebrate ID for NC.
WARNING: THIS COULD LEAD YOU INTO UNDERWATER PHOTOGRAPHY AND YOUR BANK ACCOUNT MAY SUFFER OVER THE LONG TERM, LOSS OF SPOUSE AND SELLING YOUR CHILDREN COULD RESULT
K
KeithG
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Best resources? A book, your slate and other divers. Next tool is a camera to augment your slate. Websites are way down my list because 66% of the time I dive I have no internet access.
As noted above, proactively trying to read and digest a book is just information overload. You will read about fish you never see.
We started by buying an elcheapo plastic card with drawings and names of about 50 common fish. We took it under with us. Saw a new fish, looked it up on the card right away. This worked for about 1 dive trip. We found that well over 75% of what we saw was not on our little card.
We then bought the Paul Humann set of books and started taking notes on a slate. We generally tried to only focus on 1 or 2 new fish each dive. Note the size, shape, color & behaviour and then after the dive referenced the book to determine what we saw. We found using the slate during the dive was necessary when doing 5 dives a day. Without it, at the end of the day we could not recall which fish we saw on which dive, or if we saw it yesterday.
This approach of noting 1 or 2 new fish at a time has worked very well.
We have tried to augment the slate with a happy snap camera, but found that this did not work as well. By using the slate we would make explicit notes about unique features of the fish. Sometimes these unique features would not show up in the pic. A fuzzy picture of something silvery was not much good.
Other divers are also sometimes useful when you run into a species that does not match a picture / behaviour in your book. They may be aware of the fish and can identify it for you.
We once where queried by another diver to look at a macro picture she had taken. "What's this?" she asked. We instantly identified it as a Solitary Gorgonian Hydroid. But where then amazed to discover that it harbored a swarm of very very very tiny shrimps. We had no idea that shrimps lived on a Solitary Gorgonian Hydroid and have yet to identify or see them for ourselves.
Sometimes you can pre-read about a subject and then go look for it. IF you know it lives there. Coral Wire Shrimp are a good example. If you do not know about them ahead of time, you will likely never see one.
As noted above, proactively trying to read and digest a book is just information overload. You will read about fish you never see.
We started by buying an elcheapo plastic card with drawings and names of about 50 common fish. We took it under with us. Saw a new fish, looked it up on the card right away. This worked for about 1 dive trip. We found that well over 75% of what we saw was not on our little card.
We then bought the Paul Humann set of books and started taking notes on a slate. We generally tried to only focus on 1 or 2 new fish each dive. Note the size, shape, color & behaviour and then after the dive referenced the book to determine what we saw. We found using the slate during the dive was necessary when doing 5 dives a day. Without it, at the end of the day we could not recall which fish we saw on which dive, or if we saw it yesterday.
This approach of noting 1 or 2 new fish at a time has worked very well.
We have tried to augment the slate with a happy snap camera, but found that this did not work as well. By using the slate we would make explicit notes about unique features of the fish. Sometimes these unique features would not show up in the pic. A fuzzy picture of something silvery was not much good.
Other divers are also sometimes useful when you run into a species that does not match a picture / behaviour in your book. They may be aware of the fish and can identify it for you.
We once where queried by another diver to look at a macro picture she had taken. "What's this?" she asked. We instantly identified it as a Solitary Gorgonian Hydroid. But where then amazed to discover that it harbored a swarm of very very very tiny shrimps. We had no idea that shrimps lived on a Solitary Gorgonian Hydroid and have yet to identify or see them for ourselves.
Sometimes you can pre-read about a subject and then go look for it. IF you know it lives there. Coral Wire Shrimp are a good example. If you do not know about them ahead of time, you will likely never see one.
When I really like to know the name of a fish, nudibranch, whatever I go down to the kid that runs a local tropical fish store. They handle all sorts of marine life. I am amazed the variety of plants and animals they have removed from the reef. Sad, but they have volumes of identification guides they will lend out. I'll give him a vague description and after a couple minutes he'll come up with a photo, scientific name and probably a price. Surprised there is anything to see on a real reef. have fun
I'm a marine biologist whose focus is on giant kelp dynamics, but decades ago I wanted to learn the fish that inhabit kelp forests. There was no Internet (my classmate Al Gore had just "invented" it when I moved to California. Initially I had to rely on my highly fallible memory (even worse today) and look up what I thought I saw based upon the memory. Fortunately today I carry a camera on every dive, record any fish I'm not sure of and use a wealth of inputs to ID them: the many field guides available for my region, the Internet and the photographs of local divers who archive the best of their product on-line. As mentioned REEF resources can be very helpful, and there are webinars and classes to help.
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