Fishes: East Pacific

An identification guide for the shore-fish fauna of the Tropical Eastern Pacific. This is the first of a set of 3 portable identification guides for Apple touch-screen devices that will cover the regional shore-fish faunas of the three tropical American marine regions: the Tropical Eastern Pacific, the Greater Caribbean (Caribbean and adjacent areas), and Brazil.

This App was adapted from the 2008 website Shorefishes of the tropical eastern Pacific: online information system (www.stri.org/sftep), which in turn was derived from a 2002 CD system, that was developed from English (1994) and Spanish (1998) book editions.

This stand-alone app works independently of the internet.

• Complete English and Spanish interfaces. Connect to the Spanish interface by setting Spanish in the language preference of your device.

• Covers 1,297 species; includes over 3,600 images to help identify them.

• A page for each species includes a detailed description (with information on its form, color, size, habitat and depth range), 1 or more species images (primarily photographs), key-features that distinguish it from similar species, a link to a page of similar species, and a map of its regional range.

• Browse among alphabetic lists of species and species-within-families, changing name-sorting between scientific and common (first or last) names.

• A search engine uses a combination of generic common names, location, and fish features (shape, color pattern and colors) to identify fishes.

• Keys that use a series of “either/or” choices of features allow identification of members of two species-rich families.

• A glossary of scientific terms is linked to each species page.

• The notebook module allows (1) review of recently visited species pages and (2) construction of lists that record observations about fishes. New lists can be assembled from scratch or by making blank copies of existing lists. Lists are organized in folders, and are downloadable by email.