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.
Tub Gurnard
The largest common European gurnard, with a reddish armored body and enormous, brilliantly blue-green pectoral fins that it spreads when disturbed.
saltwater
Sheepshead
A deep-bodied coastal fish easily recognized by bold black vertical bars and prominent human-like teeth, common around docks, jetties, and oyster reefs along the western Atlantic.
saltwater
Peacock Flounder
A tropical Atlantic flatfish famous for rapid color-changing camouflage and a pattern of small blue rings on a sandy brown body, with both eyes clustered on its upper left side.
reef
Japanese Halfbeak
A slim, silvery surface fish with a long lower jaw, common in coastal and brackish waters around Japan, Korea, and China.
brackish
Spotted Wolffish
A large, deep-water wolffish covered in bold dark spots, found in cold Arctic and North Atlantic waters on rocky and gravel seafloor.
deepsea
Silver Mono
The plain, uniformly silver adult form of the mono, a coin-shaped estuarine fish that loses its faint juvenile eye-bar as it matures. Common in schools around Indo-Pacific mangroves, jetties, and harbors.
brackish
Mudskipper
An amphibious goby that spends much of its life out of water, hopping across mudflats on muscular pectoral fins. Bulging, periscope-like eyes let it watch for predators while it hunts and defends its burrow.
brackishGuppy
A small livebearing fish native to northeastern South America, famous for the males' vividly colored, ornately shaped tails and its worldwide popularity in the aquarium hobby.
freshwater
Bumblebee Goby
The Bumblebee Goby is a tiny, boldly banded fish resembling its namesake insect, found in brackish mangrove and estuarine waters of Southeast Asia.
brackish
Clownfish
A small, brilliantly orange reef fish with three white bars, famous for its symbiotic partnership with sea anemones on Indo-Pacific coral reefs.
reef
Atlantic Needlefish
A long, slender silvery fish with a needle-like toothy beak, common in coastal and estuarine waters of the western Atlantic where it hunts small fish near the surface.
brackish
Telescopefish
A slender deep-sea fish named for its forward-directed, tubular telescoping eyes, which provide sharp binocular vision to detect faint prey silhouettes in near-total darkness.
deepsea
Narrow-barred Spanish Mackerel
A large, fast-swimming mackerel of the Indo-Pacific marked by numerous narrow, wavy dark bars running down its silvery sides.
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
Meagre
The Meagre is a large, golden-silver sciaenid of the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean, among the biggest members of the drum family.
saltwater
Margined Flyingfish
A large flyingfish with dark, blue-margined wing-like pectoral fins that glides across open tropical and subtropical seas.
pelagic
Midas Cichlid
A large, variably colored Central American cichlid, ranging from mottled gray to solid gold-orange, known for its bold and often combative nature.
freshwater
Emperor Tetra
A refined, violet-blue tetra from Colombia known for a bold black lateral stripe and males' elongated, sword-like central tail rays.
freshwater
Croaking Gourami
A small Southeast Asian gourami capable of producing an audible croaking sound using modified pectoral fin muscles, marked with iridescent blue-green stripes and spots along a brownish body.
freshwater
Chain Pickerel
A slender, elongated ambush predator with a distinctive dark chain-like pattern over green sides, common in weedy lakes and sluggish rivers of the eastern United States.
freshwater
California Scorpionfish
A mottled reddish-brown scorpionfish of the California coast, camouflaged against rocky and sandy bottoms and equipped with venomous spines along its dorsal fin.
saltwater
Candiru
A tiny, translucent Amazonian catfish that feeds by attaching to the gills of larger fish and consuming their blood, one of the few parasitic vertebrates known.
freshwater
Blackwing Flyingfish
A stocky, wide-ranging flyingfish named for its large dusky-black pectoral wings, found gliding above open ocean surface waters across much of the world's warm and temperate seas.
pelagic
Black Molly
A solid-black, selectively bred color strain of the common molly, the black molly is one of the most recognizable and widely kept aquarium livebearers.
freshwater