The primary trait source for fish species. Sister database SeaLifeBase covers non-fish marine taxa (invertebrates, marine mammals, reptiles).
Access
- R package `rfishbase` — wraps a SQL mirror of FishBase. The ETL uses
the same mirror via DuckDB.
- REST API: secondary; rate-limited.
Tables we use
species — common name, max body length, depth rangeecology — habitat string, trophic level, prey strategycommon_names — per-language vernacularspredators — basic food-web edges (used sparingly)
Caveats
- Coverage is best for commercially / recreationally important fish; tail
taxa may lack body length or trophic data.
- Trophic level is a model output (Ecopath estimate), not directly measured —
treat as ordinal, not metric.