The 19th Hellenic Conference of Ichthyologists, held in Ioannina, Greece from October 30 to November 2, 2025, celebrated the forefront of ichthyology and fisheries science. Among the highlights was the inaugural presentation of the Rainer Froese Award, established to honor the legacy of Dr. Rainer Froese (GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for…
GEOMAR researchers identify systemic weaknesses in EU fisheries management and are calling for quotas to be set independently of national interests 22 May 2025/Kiel. Every year, total allowable catches (TACs) and fishing quotas are set across Europe through a multi-step process – and yet many fish stocks in EU waters…
By Daniel Pauly, Rainer Froese and Nicolas Bailly The Quantitative Aquatics and Sea Around Us teams lament the passing of W.N ‘Bill’ Eschmeyer (1939-2024), the founding editor and namesake of the Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes (ECoF). Born in Knoxville, USA, Eschmeyer studied marine biology at the University of Michigan, following…
Experts Call for More Realistic Stock Assessments The state of fish stocks in the world’s oceans is worse than previously thought. While overfishing has long been blamed on fisheries policies setting catch limits higher than scientific recommendations, a new study from four Australian research institutions reveals that even those scientific…
The physical relief that temperate fish like cod and Atlantic herring experience after they allows them to breathe in more oxygen and develop a voracious appetite, all of which leads to a rapid increase in body weight. New research published in Environmental Biology of Fishes turns on its head the widespread notion that…
A recent update introduced to the CMSY methodology used for assessing the status of fish stocks has proven to be more accurate in predicting the catch that a population can support than highly-valued data-intensive models. In a paper published in the journal Acta Ichthyologica et Piscatoria, the international team of researchers that shaped the…
In a five-day workshop organized by the EcoScope project at the Fisheries Research Institute (FRI) in Kavala, Greece from May 1st to May 5th of 2023, members of the Project Executive Board and International Advisory Board of EcoScope were joined by ten partners under Work Package 5: Assessing the Ecosystem…
Contrary to what is stated in biology textbooks, the growth of fish doesn’t slow down when and because they start spawning. In fact, their growth accelerates after they reproduce, according to a new article published in Science. The paper is a technical comment by Dr. Rainer Froese, senior scientist at the Geomar Helmholtz…
Climate change will bring about significant distributional reorganization of marine life with a net range loss of core habitat for the majority of marine species, a new study led by researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven (AWI) and co-authored by the AquaMaps…
“Can you help us?”–A simple request from FishBase pioneer Dr. Daniel Pauly to UBC Researcher Dr. Gabriel Reygondeau, led to a recent breakthrough for one of the cutting-edge databases of Q-quatics. AquaMaps is the global species distribution modelling component of FishBase and SeaLifeBase. It creates predictive maps of the natural…