Do desert fish have an image problem?

Authors: David Rogowski

Year: 2017 (xlix)

Abstract

There are a variety of ways to measure popularity Popularity can be measured by the number of Facebook friends, how many votes one garners in reality TV shows, political offices, and best restaurants Popularity can be measured by how many times an item is purchased, books, and music But how do you measure the popularity of fishes? People are utilizing the worldwide web to answer a variety of questions, with Google dominating the field, with Wikipedia the free on-line encyclopedia as the fifth most visited web-site in the world However, it is much easier to extract data and metrics from Wikipedia than a commercial site I used pageview analyses of Wikipedia to rank the most popular freshwater fishes in the English speaking world Over 400 fishes, including sport fishes, ornamental fishes, native fishes as well as common freshwater invasive fishes from 2008 to 2016 were included in this analysis While relative ranking of species varied over time, the top two rankings were for catfish and koi Our native desert fishes ranked fairly low with the pupfish ranking only 110, Humpback Chub at 161 and Razorback Sucker at 177 Why do are native desert fishes relative ranks fairly low? Can we increase the visibility of our native desert fish and thereby increase pageviews?