FishLarvaeBase – A global pelagic dispersal traits database
for early-life stages of marine fishes

Editor & Manager: Eliot Ruiz / Developer: Anthony Hunt

To support research on the early life stages of marine fishes, we compiled a comprehensive database of 35 traits (7 qualitative and 28 quantitative) describing developmental, behavioral, and ecological aspects of the pelagic phase. We focused on traits most relevant to pelagic dispersal processes and the parameterization of biophysical dispersal models. The database includes 471 new records on age and size at settlement, including 207 previously unpublished entries and 264 newly acquired during two fieldworks in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. These fieldworks also allowed obtaining 41 new measurements of swimming performance in situ (see: https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.70011). Behavioral databases were completed by 907 previously unpublished records of larval fish vertical position in the water column. Considered together, dispersal traits datasets comprise 47,062 records across 6,838 marine fish species, representing 1,907 genera, 341 families, and 48 orders, sourced from 3,201 references.

FishLarvaeBase was further enriched by an additional 9,442 colored pictures of post-flexion and early juveniles of 1,940 species obtained from 196 sources. Various growth rate models from 47 original references and 90 populations are also newly displayed, along with age-at-length data. The adult habitat and ecosystem were initially acquired from WoRMS and FishBase tables, even though they were largely curated manually to avoid any errors. Indeed, we used these tables to add freshwater species with a marine larval stage (work in progress), and remove purely pelagic species (living in the water column offshore) from settlement size/age and pelagic juveniles tables. Finally, expert-based distribution areas (IUCN or literature analyses) or curated occurrences (OBIS, GBIF, VertNet, iDigBio and iNaturalist) of adults, depending on availability, were acquired for 17,279 fish species, to allow filtering families, genera and species by Marine Ecoregions (Spalding et al., 2007) or Pelagic Provinces (Spalding et al., 2012) of the world.