Detail:  No book has ever attempted to deal with the catfishes (all 32 families) in their entirety - until now. Here at last is the definitive book on catfishes dealing with the more than 2000 species. Included is everything from the tiny South American Scoloplax dicra less than an inch long to the better than six-foot-long giant Pangasianodon gigas from the Mekong River in Southeast Asia. Not only are the freshwaters species treated but also the marine catfishes, almost all concentrated in two families Plotosidae and Ariidae.

The text treats the catfishes family by family, giving for each the morphological characters as well as any biological information that may be available. A key to the genera contained within the family is offered whenever possible, and descriptions of each genus are provided along with an outline drawing of a species of almost every genus to help in generic recognition. Further discussions include biological information as well as spawning procedures for those species where it is known. At the end of each family write-up is included a complete checklist of the genera and species. This checklist of catfish species of the world has never been offered before and should be of great usefulness to scientists as well as aquarists.