Kicking off the FishBase and SeaLifeBase anniversary celebrations

Kicking off the FishBase and SeaLifeBase anniversary celebrations

The year 2020 marks the 30th anniversary of FishBase and 15th anniversary of SeaLifeBase, two online global biodiversity information systems that, together, provide biological and ecological information on more than 110,000 marine species.

To celebrate these milestones in the times of physical distancing, we are launching a year-long digital campaign that leads up to September 2020, when we celebrate these anniversaries, and to September 2021, when we hope to get together in person at a symposium to be held during the Annual FishBase Consortium Meeting.

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Jack Randall (1924 – 2020): a friend of FishBase

Jack Randall (1924 – 2020): a friend of FishBase

Jack Randall at an FAO/ICLARM/MSI/NORAD workshop held in early October 1995
in the Philippines, and devoted to the creation guide the fishery resources of the Central
Western Pacific (see Froese and Pauly 2000, p. 13). Photo by Rachel ‘Aque’ Atanacio.

Text by Daniel Pauly.

The public at large and scientists who are not taxonomists share a view of taxonomists as hard to connect with and sometimes remote; this may apply to some of them, but as with everything, there are exceptions. One of these exceptions was Jack Randall.

John Ernest Randall was born in 1924 in Los Angeles, California. He studied at UCLA and then went to the University of Hawai’i, which he left in 1955 with a Ph.D. After various jobs in Florida and Puerto Rico, he became a Senior Ichthyologist at the Bishop Museum in Hawai’i (see Wikipedia), the position he held when he began his association with FishBase.

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Galápagos as a living laboratory for the Anthropocene

Galápagos as a living laboratory for the Anthropocene

Galápagos. Image by averno_ph, Needpix.

Galápagos. Image by averno_ph, Needpix.

An international team of researchers led by experts at the Charles Darwin Foundation and with the collaboration of the Sea Around Us principal investigator, Daniel Pauly, and William Cheung, from the Changing Ocean Research Unit at UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, just published a commentary in Nature Climate Change proposing the idea of Galápagos as a living laboratory for the Anthropocene.

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