FISHBIO is a fisheries and environmental consulting company that researchers, resource agencies, water districts and conservation groups hire to study, monitor and help protect wild fish populations rather than a service for home aquarium owners. Founded in 2006 in Oakdale, California, the company now operates from offices in Chico and Oakdale plus a location in Vientiane, Laos, giving it an operational footprint that spans California’s Central Valley and the Lower Mekong Basin in Southeast Asia. FISHBIO structures its work around five core services, research, monitoring, conservation, fabrication and communication, and its multidisciplinary staff includes fisheries biologists, engineers and technicians who build much of their own field equipment in house.
That fabrication capability sets FISHBIO apart from many fisheries consultants who rely entirely on off the shelf gear. The company designs and builds custom fish traps, resistance board weirs and PIT tag antenna systems, and its technology lineup spans acoustic tracking and PIT tags, ARIS and DIDSON imaging sonar, drones and custom cameras, fyke traps, rotary screw traps and electrofishing gear, plus a molecular lab for eDNA species detection and genetic sample analysis. FISHBIO also maintains an onsite fish lab with aquariums and tanks for controlled equipment studies. In Southeast Asia, the team works on community based fish conservation zones and capacity building projects throughout the Mekong Basin, alongside its longer running California salmon and steelhead monitoring work. FISHBIO also publishes The Fish Report, a weekly newsletter covering fisheries news and its own research findings, and shares its peer reviewed publications and field work through its blog and multimedia archive.
