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Species and Families

The Species and Families page allows you to rapidly map the commercial fisheries catch of particular fish species or groups of fish.

A species or family of interest can be found by using the Search tool, the lists of species and families, or from the dropdown lists available within the Mapper. Please refer to the notes below on how to map commercial catches of a species.

Species Search

Please enter a common name, scientific name or CAAB code (maximum 15 characters): 
 

Species and Families Lists

List of the top 50 fish families, ranked by commercial catch.
Top 50 commercially caught fish families

List of all fish families.
Commercially caught fish families

List of all fish species.
Commercially caught fish species

Notes on Finding and Mapping a Species

The commercial fisheries data are compiled from a large variety of sources that in some cases give a precise species name for a fish, or in other cases may only identify fish to a group or family name. The Atlas seeks to preserve as much fish identification information as possible. This means that, depending on your species and region of interest, you may need to look at both the species data and the family data to get a complete picture of commercial catches for a particular species of fish.

Many species are reported in groups of closely related species (eg related flathead species or related prawn species). It is useful to examine the list of all fish species to check if a species may be recorded by itself and also as part of a group of fish species.

All catches within the Western Australian State jurisdiction are reported only to family level within the Atlas at present.

Example 1:
If you wish to map snapper across Australia you would need to look at both the species map (snapper - Pagrus auratus) and the snapper family in total (Snappers - Sparidae) to get a complete picture. If you were only interested in Tasmanian and Victorian snapper then the species map would be reasonably complete.
Example 2:
If you wish to account for all eastern king prawn catch across Australia you would need to locate its entry in the list of all fish species, along with any associated entries for that species. From there you would need to look at the species maps for eastern king prawn - Melicertus plebejus, then the species map for king prawns as a group and finally for the entire family of Penaeid prawns.

A complete listing of fish species and families from each jurisdiction is contained in the Reports section of the site.

It should be noted that, to protect confidentiality, the Atlas does not contain data for any half-degree cell where there were fewer than 5 boats operating.