Database on catfishes of India.

The introduction of computer processing and computer databases have provided opportunities to store vast amount of data and open this vast data store to many new uses (Chapman 1999). The data store managed through database management system provides valuable information especially for decision making and planning. In this communication, we used the database management system and application programming interface (API) to develop the CD version of database for 169 catfishes belonging to 14 families, 15 subfamilies and 55 genera from different ecosystems of India providing information on taxonomy, common name, group name, vernacular name, synonyms, habitat, resident environment, distribution, morphological characters, economic importance, threatened status and fishery information in addition to fish photographs and references. In the database of 169 catfishes, 139 are freshwater species, 01 is marine species, 12 species are common to both fresh and brackish waters; 6 species are common to fresh, brackish and marine waters and 11 species are common to brackish and marine waters. The database contains 102 key references and 200 photographs and was developed using the MSACCES relational database management system and Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 enterprise edition technologies under Windows XP environment. Open database connectivity (ODBC) programming interface was used in the API to access data in database management system. The principal objective of the study was to provide a low-cost product with recent information on the catfishes from India to the scientific community, researchers, educationists and students of fisheries domain.