Reef Fish Identification for the fish watcher | Reef Fish Identification - Tropical Pacific

My first choice for IDing fish | Reef Fish Identification - Tropical Pacific | Gerald Allen, Roger Steene, ...

books:


	• Reef Fish Identification - Tropical Pacific Gerald Allen, Roger Steene, ... New World Publications, 2003 - 457 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Lots of Fish Photos from the Pacific

My wife and I are avid divers and this Reef Fish ID book is good. However, it is not quite the quality of Paul Humann's other reef guides.
On the plus side, there aree hundreds of photos. On the minus side, the photos are rather small.

Additionally, the booklet does a decent job of describing the fish but provides little information about fish behavior.

Reef Fish Identification for the fish watcher

I am a fish watcher, which is to say that I keep careful track of the species of fish that I see on my trips. My wife and I are headed to Bali for a month. This guide was recommended to us. Reef fish of the Tropical Pacific pictures lots of species and covers a very large area. The pictures are fairly good for the purposes of identification. The ranges given for the fish are fairly helpful, but we find it difficult to interpret exactly when a species might occur in our area. Distribution maps would be an improvement. Having said that, this guide may be about the best available for areas of the tropical Pacific for which a specific guide does not exist. jeff

for more information click here

My first choice for IDing fish

I just came back from a dive trip to Bali and spent a week, off and on, IDing the fish I'd photographed. This book turned out to be the most useful. It includes photos of a lot of color/sex/age variations that proved invaluable. This book also puts little arrows in many pics to point out features that help differentiate a fish from otherwise similar ones--I found that to be very useful.

However, though it's the best book for tropical Pacific fish IDing, I did find that I needed to cross-reference it with several others in ambiguous cases (and many cases were ambiguous!)--particularly one Aussie book that uses paintings instead of photos: "Marine Fishes of South-East Asia" by Gerry Allen (though this book often uses different common names, so you'll have to go by scientific names in many cases to correlate it with American texts). Sometimes a painting can highlight features a particular photo won't show clearly. And this book shows some interesting fish that aren't strictly coral reef fish, which nevertheless you might see on a trip (think mahi-mahi, flying fish etc.).

Lastly, you should also have a general underwater guide, for 3 reasons: (1) this is what you should actually bring with you on a trip, leaving larger, heavier, more specialized books like the one being reviewed here at home (especially with current luggage weight restrictions). (2) A general guide, such as "Indo-Pacific Coral Reef Guide" by Dr. Gerald R. Allen & Roger Steene, also has everything from corals to sea snakes. (3) Any given fish you see is probably a common one; a general guide will only show common fish. So you'll generally want to look here first.

The book I'm reviewing here is organized for identification rather than scientifically. It uses 20 ID groups, such as "disk-shaped/colorful" and "odd-shaped bottom dwellers." This is appropriate since it's a fish ID book.

If you dive in Pacific/Asian waters--and that's the best diving on Earth in my experience--and you'd really like to know what the heck you saw--get this book.

for more information click here

Great book!

Very comprehensive, just what i wanted to identify the marine photos i taken. Now, i need one more book on nudibranches too.

Fantastic Resource

This book is filled with clear, colorful photos to help the diver to easily identify the various fish. It also has helpful information regarding common habitat, size and specific markings. It is definitely worth the money!

Finally, a comprehensive fish identification guide covering the fish-rich reefs of the Pacific. It contains 2,500 underwater photographs of 2,000 species from four of the best marine life authors/photographers in the business. Their collaboration makes it possible for underwater naturalists to identify fishes from Thailand to Tahiti with a single, compact, easy-to-use, no-nonsense reference. 108 fish families are presented in one of 20 Identification groups based on a family's related visual or behavioural characteristics, such as Large Oval / Colourful or Sand/Burrow Dwellers. Likewise, every effort has been made to group similar appearing species together.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

hot