Made for
the curious.
A small, independent fish wiki.
No grand expedition required.
A cabinet of
aquatic curiosities.
Fischwiki is a personal, non-commercial project about fish. There are familiar river species here, open-ocean travellers and a few animals that look like someone got carried away.
The illustrations come mostly from the eighteenth-century work of Marcus Elieser Bloch. The species notes use modern names and describe how these animals live, reproduce and fare in the wild.
A note on the numbers.
Lengths and weights are reported maxima unless otherwise stated. Most fish you encounter will be smaller. Ages may be estimates or captive records; those are marked in the profiles. Standard length excludes the tail fin; total length includes it. A maximum is not a promise.
The conservation labels describe global IUCN assessments, which are published in different years. Atlantic cod’s widely cited Vulnerable assessment, for example, dates to 1996. Consult the linked record and local conservation guidance for a current decision.
Taxonomic placements can differ between authorities. Historical plate captions also use names that have since changed. These images are documents of natural history, rather than identification diagrams or scale drawings.
The reference shelf.
FishBase ↗Species profiles, distribution, reported maximum sizes and life histories.IUCN Red List ↗Global extinction risk assessments. The publication year matters: an assessment may be much older than this website.Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes ↗Scientific names and taxonomy, maintained by the California Academy of Sciences.Biodiversity Heritage Library ↗Digitised volumes of Bloch’s Ichthyologie and the source of most historical plates in this collection.IUCN: Atlantic salmon assessment, 2023 ↗The global reassessment of Atlantic salmon as Near Threatened.IUCN: Tuna reassessment, 2021 ↗Atlantic bluefin tuna’s change to Least Concern, with important differences between regional stocks.The original plates.
Locally hosted, with a source for every image.
Click a title to see its original record.
The Bloch and Andrew Smith illustrations below are in the public domain. The coelacanth photograph is by Alberto Fernandez Fernandez, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Images have been resized and converted to WebP; the salmon plate has also been cropped. The adapted coelacanth files retain CC BY-SA 3.0.