UNIVERSAL FISH CATALOGUE

Like all major current Fish Databases, FishWise is based on the work of Bill Eschmeyer and his colleagues from the California Academy of Sciences. Bill is widely accepted as the father of modern fish databases. Dennis has worked closely with him for many years and Bill has generously given him access to his data and spent many hours teaching him how to understand it. Bill has been Dennis' mentor and guidance on this project. Many other people have contributed to the project.

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The simple Scientific Name is called a binomen. It is made up of two parts, the Genus and the Species and will typically have the form “Pomacanthus imperator”. Conventionally the binomen is italicized, the first character of Genus is capitalized and the balance of the name is in lower case. The Scientific Name is often incorrectly referred to as the Latin Name. It is in fact made up from names that are then Latinized. Many of the names come from Latin or Greek but can also come from other languages. The final name must follow the rules of Latin, for instance the Genus will have a gender and the Species should have the same gender. The ending of the Species name would then generally indicate the gender so that ‘us’, ‘a’ and ‘um’ as endings would indicate masculine, feminine and neuter unless the original author or revisor indicate or imply that this is not the case. This binomial nomenclature is used by all scientists around the world for naming organisms.

Click here to read more about the naming of fish...

The copyright of any picture belongs to the owner and pictures may not be downloaded or used without the written permission of the owner. All pictures shown on this website will credit the photographer or owner of the picture. The pictures included in FishWise have been collected over more than 18 years.

FishWise was originally created for private use and there was never any intention of marketing FishWise or publishing any of the pictures. Only recently was a decision taken to create a website and now there are more than 34000 Pictures, both in our Galleries and in the species detail pages of the main data base. These are displayed together with the results of some of the  Search options.

Click here to view more information about the taking of fish pictures...

If any pictures shown on this website belong to anyone who does not want their pictures to appear on the site, please urgently contact us by clicking on 'contact us' and they will be removed immediately. There is no need to list all the pictures to be removed, as all pictures are linked to a photographer and by giving the photographer’s name all pictures belonging to that photographer can easily be removed. It would also be greatly appreciated if anyone who owns pictures shown on this website that has not given permission to FishWise to use them, but does not object to them being used, would contact us by clicking on 'contact us'  and giving FishWise permission. We would like to have your contact details so that we can be in contact and can thank you.

Ichthyology (from Greek: ἰχθυ, ikhthu, "fish"; and λόγος, logos, "knowledge") is the branch of zoology devoted to the study of fish. This includes skeletal fish (Osteichthyes), cartilaginous fish (Chondrichthyes), and jawless fish (Agnatha).

Since the publication of the 10th edition of "Systema Naturae" the major work by Linnaeus in 1758, (now considered the starting point of zoological nomenclature), 58 915 fish species have been described up to November 2009.

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