How to identify Unknown Fish

[Macromatt]

I've been thinking for the past few weeks about a project for myself, and I need some input from all of you. There are so many posts on this forum and all the others about "What species is my fish?". Is there a logical way of going about finding out what species of fish you have?

I was thinking of making an interactive website, stricktly to help identify your type of fish. It would start out asking general questions, and narrow it down until a particular species was identified.

However, I'm not sure exactly how to do it. I want someone who doesn't know the difference between a loach and cichlid to be able to look at the drawings/photos and be able to get the correct species.

I know something like this can never be perfect, but it could at least help the hobbyist figure out what species they have, and then do further research to clarify or reinforce what they found.

Any ideas on the easiest way to broadly sort fish based on looks, without using any names of them? Such as certain body shapes, or features.



Matt

[fish dude]

^^^^^^!!!

[OrionGirl]

Head to your local library, and check out as many books on fish identification as possible. There are indeed many ways to identify fish, starting from general features and trickling down the specific. Hoever, many of them require more then surface understanding of fish physiology--counting rays, identifying the location of fin pairs, ect. It's going to be very complex, so you'll want to break it down and have links from each step, so the more advanced person isn't forced to follow all the steps (example, be able to jump straight to cyprinids, instead of noting fin locations and body shape).

Find a good book on fish taxonomy. Most will have a key guide, and you could turn it into something electronic with specific pictures to help the novice. There is a lot of this data in FishBase, but it isn't setup to search the features, rather, you search for the species and it displays the features. You'll have a HUGE project on your hands...GL! See if a local university would be willing to sponsor your efforts. Most of the ones currently online focus on SW fish, or native species, rather than tropicals.

[VoodooChild]

This is going to be really big if you want to do it. Sure, there are obvious differences in some, like a cardinal tetra and a neon tetra. But it gets much trickier the farther you get, particularely since taxonomy is recreating our hobby every day (I for one thinks that's a good thing:rolleyes: ). For example, if someone happens upon a Paracheirodon simulans (extremely unlikely, but you get the picture), how do they tell it apart from your standard neon, P. innesi? Then you start getting into diameter of the eye is less then the length of the mouth or whether or not there is a set of barbels under the premaxillary groove...you get the idea. If you can do it though, I'd love to see it. Like Orion said though, this would be a huge project. Best of luck!

[Macromatt]

I'm thinking I could start simple, and get more complex as I go along. I'm going to try it with a few common species to be sure the programming and the logic works out ok, have a test period to see selection process works and how to improve it, then on to just adding fish after fish. :)

Matt