Fish Encyclopedia
Search and identify 1,000+ fish species — freshwater, saltwater, reef, and pelagic — with habitat, size, diet, behavior, and how to tell them apart.
Bastard Halibut
An alternate name for the olive flounder, a large East Asian coastal flatfish with a muscular olive-brown mottled body, big toothy mouth, and left-sided eyes.
saltwater
Blackfin Clownfish
An orange anemonefish with a single white head bar and distinctive black-edged pelvic and anal fins, endemic to reefs around the Maldives and Sri Lanka.
reef
Bluegill
A common North American sunfish recognized by its deep, rounded body and the dark blotch on its gill cover, widely found in lakes and ponds and popular with anglers.
freshwater
Bonito
A fast, streamlined relative of the tunas and mackerels, marked by bold dark diagonal stripes across its upper back, found in schools across temperate and warm seas.
pelagic
Black Sea Bream
A deep-bodied porgy of the Mediterranean and Eastern Atlantic, notable for males that excavate and guard nest depressions on the seabed during spawning.
saltwater
Black Phantom Tetra
A gray-black Paraguay basin characin known for its dramatic sail-like dorsal fin displays and mild social hierarchy behavior among males.
freshwater
Barramundi Cod
The Australian common name for the panther grouper, a pale gray, black-spotted reef grouper instantly recognizable by its small head and steeply humped forehead.
reef
Barbour's Seahorse
A small, spiny-crowned seahorse native to the coral reefs and seagrass beds of the western Pacific, distinguished by fine dark banding along its snout.
reef
Barred Mudskipper
An amphibious mangrove goby with bulging eyes and muscular fins that lets it crawl and hop across exposed mud at low tide throughout the Indo-Pacific.
brackish
Bicolor Anthias
A small Indo-Pacific reef fish sharply divided in color, with a violet-purple front half and a golden-yellow rear half, forming loose groups above reef structure.
reef
Amberjack
A powerful, deep-bodied jack that patrols reefs and wrecks worldwide in warm seas, known for its stubborn fighting strength and amber-tinted flanks.
reef
Azure Damselfish
A small, vividly blue damselfish common on Indo-Pacific reef flats and lagoons, easily spotted flitting among coral rubble in loose groups.
reef
Uaru
A large, deep-bodied Amazonian cichlid known for a dramatic color change with age, from a striped juvenile pattern to a mottled brown adult, and for a rare parenting behavior in which parents feed their fry a body-slime secretion.
freshwater
Starry Flounder
The starry flounder is a distinctive North Pacific flatfish recognized by alternating orange and black bands across its fins and rough, star-shaped scales, and notable for tolerating a wide range of salinities.
brackish
Spotted Scat
A deep-bodied, disc-shaped fish covered in dark spots over an olive-to-silver background, common in Indo-Pacific estuaries and harbors. Its bold pattern and spiny dorsal fin make it easy to pick out among schooling brackish fish.
brackish
Sculpin
A broad-headed, bottom-dwelling fish of the family Cottidae, represented here by the widespread Pacific Staghorn Sculpin, known for its large fan-like pectoral fins and mottled camouflage on sandy and muddy bottoms.
saltwaterPacific Sardine
A silvery, spot-flanked schooling fish found along the Pacific coast of North America, famous for boom-and-bust population cycles driven by shifting ocean temperatures and historically massive coastal schools.
pelagic
Midas Blenny
An elongated, brightly colored blenny that ranges from golden-yellow to blue-violet and often mimics the appearance and swimming style of similarly colored basslets. It hovers near reef crevices along drop-offs.
reef
Long-snouted Seahorse
The long-snouted seahorse, also known as the spiny seahorse, is a slender species of the Mediterranean and northeastern Atlantic with a proportionally long snout and often ornate skin filaments used for camouflage in seagrass beds.
saltwater
Mono
A shimmering, disc-shaped fish with a strongly flattened body and tall, angular fins, native to Indo-Pacific estuaries. Adults school in brackish coastal waters and shift gradually toward full seawater as they mature.
brackish
Licorice Gourami
A tiny, secretive Sumatran blackwater specialist with a dark body crossed by iridescent turquoise stripes and red-edged fins, one of several closely related "licorice gourami" species from acidic peat swamps.
freshwater
Lemon Shark
A stocky, yellow-brown coastal shark named for its sandy coloration, recognized by two nearly equal-sized dorsal fins, common in shallow mangrove and reef habitats of the western Atlantic and eastern Pacific.
cartilaginous
Green Chromide
A deep-bodied cichlid from South Asian estuaries, olive-green with rows of shimmering pearly spots along its flanks. It is one of the largest brackish-water cichlids and an important species in coastal lagoon ecosystems.
brackish
Knight Goby
A small, boldly patterned goby from Southeast Asian estuaries, pale gray-white with scattered black spots and blotches along its slender body. It perches on the bottom, propped on its fused pelvic fins, watching for small prey.
brackish