202 
Fishery Bulletin 108(2) 
Month 2004-2006 
Figure 4 (continued) 
are indicative of nearby adult spawning activity. The 
tradeoff, however, was that many of the larvae were 
too small to identify to the genus or species level. As 
a result, most fish larvae collected in this survey were 
identified to the order and family level only (14% and 
52%, respectively). 
Fifty-eight different families of fishes were collected 
in our ichthyoplankton collections, the adult forms of 
which represent diverse zoogeographic regions and 
ecological niches. As expected, larvae of nearshore 
and inner shelf species were the most dominant, such 
as coastal pelagic (e.g., engraulids, carangids, clupe- 
ids, stromateids, gerreids) and coastal demersal (e.g., 
sciaenids, paralichthyids, gobiids, cynoglossids, syn- 
odontids) species. Unidentified engraulids were the 
most abundant larval fish group in our survey (ap- 
