Customer Reviews

A Field Guide to Atlantic Coast Fishes : North America (Peterson Field Guides)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a perfect resource for fishermen, scientists, environmentalists and anyone who would like to learn more about fish and how to identify them. The book has beautiful color and black & white illustrations of thousands of fish. The illustrations can be used to quickly identify fish species "in the field". In addition to field identification keys, the book also details the geographical range, habitat, standard sizes, and a variety of other information regarding every species of fish that can be found from the Florida to Maine, deep seas to coastal estuaries. This book is an excellent resource and provides very interesting information regarding both common and rare species of fish. Highly recommended reading!

If there is one book that will link people interested in fishes along the Atlantic coast of the US or the Gulf of Mexico... this is it. If you SCUBA dive, fish, keep saltwater aquariums or are an amature or professional naturalist or marine biologist you should have this book.
The Field guide to Atlantic Coast Fishes is an excellent treatise on the diversity of fishes in this area. The multitude of species are discussed in a logical manner with valuable information presented for each. The artwork is superb, with the each fish shown next to similar fish and critical points to identification highlighted. You should own three copies, one for your home, one for your office and one for your boat.

I have a few Peterson Guides (such as one for birds, and one for reptiles and amphibians) and I swear by them. I have always been able to count on Peterson Guides to provide detailed color illustrations with clearly defined identifying marks. This guide was a huge disappointment. The majority of the illustration plates are in black and white! I have no idea what possessed the editors to settle for a grayscale version from a guide series so well known for its colorful illustrations! (Wish I'd read the review below mine before I purchased this!)

The few color illustration plates are excellent as is usual for Peterson Guides. Even the black and white images are very well drawn (but tremendously less helpful than their color counterparts). The descriptions of each species are generally well-written and helpful, though not as extensive as the descriptions in other Peterson Guides.

In short, you won't find this guide to be totally useless, but it would be worth looking around for (and probably not hard to find) something better. It's clear to me that the Peterson editors either (a.) have a distinct bias towards terrestrial animals and don't care much for ichthyology, or (b.) were in a great rush to finish this guide quickly at the expense of quality. Whatever the explanation, one thing is for sure: the negligence apparent in the making of this guide is very out of character for Peterson.

We were disappointed in this particular guide. We have Peterson bird guides that are great but the fishes guide is mostly black and white images and many varieties of fish had no image at all. Written information was available for all species.

This is a field Identification book, If you really want to know what you caught, you need better literature. When you catch smaller fish species, many of the key features listed for them do not pertain to your catch. That, and the book is built to fall apart, with the plates in the center of the book struggling to freedom within a year.

This is a must have book for anglers or anyone with a passion for Atlantic saltwater fish. The descriptions are clear and concise and the images have notations to help with species identification.

This is the single most useful guide to fishes of the Atlantic Coast because it is reasonably comprehensive, portable, accurate, authoritative, and well-illustrated. Other reviews note the lack of color plates in comparison to Peterson guides for birds, for example, but what matters from the standpoint of identification of marine fishes are field marks, which are very well presented in the illustrations in this guide. There are more than 30,000 living species of fishes, about three times the living species biodiversity of birds. Many species of fishes are rare and poorly known, and they span a range of habitats very difficult to sample (e.g., depths below 1000m). Thus, no one is ever likely to generate a completely comprehensive all-color field book for fishes of this region. But this single volume is very close to ideal, which I why my students and I have used it in my ichthyology courses for more than two decades.

This is a great field guide. Though some would like full color illustrations, variablility in coloration occurs quite often in fish depending on habitat and other factors. The text descriptions are quite clear. The only complaint I have, is the binding isn't very sturdy. I'm on my 4th copy! My field guides go into the field (or in this case on the boat)where the elements will take their toll very quickly on poorly constructed material.

This is a pretty good book for identifying the different species of fish, and giving a very brief overview of each species mentioned. however, with 1100 species packed into one book, the descriptions are brief, and the advertised information like temperature and salinity are not listed for all of the species - in fact I would say water temperature and depth are not listed for most.

75% of the illustrations are full color and are very good. however, the rest are black and white sketches, which make identification by sight pretty difficult. Even on those though, the identifying features are pointed out where appropriate.

Overall I would recommend this book to anyone interested in identifying fish of the Atlantic Coast. If you're a fisherman looking for information on habitat, water temperatures, depth, etc - you might need some other books in addition to this one.