Alaska Fish Stomach Examiner's Tool

Metopa sp. (Family Stenothoidae)

The Resource Ecology and Ecosystem Modeling Program at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center has been collecting and processing stomachs of the marine fish collected from the eastern Bering Sea, Gulf of Alaska, and Aleutian Islands since 1983.

Diet data are used to describe feeding ecology and predator-prey relationships and are used for mortality estimation, fishery management and ecosystem modeling. Therefore, many researchers encounter situations where they need to get diet data by processing fish stomachs.

This is a comprehensive guide for stomach content analysts to use to identify marine prey in fish stomachs.