Conceived as a supplement to Fishes of Chesapeake Bay (Murdy et al., 1997), this handsome volume treats in some detail 211 of the fish species known to occur in Chesapeake Bay (i.e., those fishes commonly found in salinities of 5% or higher seaward to a line between the Virginia capes–Charles and Henry). Fittingly this book is dedicated to John Edward Olney, Sr. (1947–2010), professor and chair, Department of Fisheries Science at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, who made major contributions to systematics and ecology of fishes and to fisheries management (see Hilton et al., 2011, for an obituary).
This is the third book to cover Chesapeake-Bay fishes—the first by Hildebrand and Schroeder (1928, reprinted 1972), the second noted above by Murdy et al. (1997). Chesapeake Bay is geologically young, its origin dating to near the end of the last ice age, only about 20,000...