Everything ichthyological used to be housed under one massive, sprawling site. Clocking in at more than 680 pages (although that’s waay down from 1,700+ pages back when we redesigned it in 2016!), it was a very deep site that became difficult to navigate once you drilled down several levels.

(Fun fact: it took 5 of our staff members a combined total of 238 hours to complete the migration this time around.)

The various fish staffs agreed that dividing the site into logical sites (while still interlinking when appropriate, of course) would help with orienting the visitor and better serve the different audiences for each area. They are now organized as follows:

• Fish Collection
• Discover Fish Education Site
• Sawfish Research
• Florida Program for Shark Research
• International Shark Attack File  (launched separately in February)

In addition, this launch was timed with a story published in Nature regarding the first time that a shark involved in a bite was successfully identified using DNA. (Read the full story here!) Gavin’s team wanted to piggyback on this publicity to showcase a new interactive map for exploring shark attacks on a global scale. It allows users to select time periods, species involved and zoom in on a worldwide map.

The same style of map was also launched showing global sawfish encounters.