length_weight function returning incomplete tables

[shaunpwilkinson]

Hi there, I'm using the length_weight function to find the a and b parameters for various fish species, but finding that the output tables don't contain all of the entries that appear if I manually navigate to the length-weight table through the fishbase.org user interface. Here's an example:

Balistapus <- length_weight("Balistapus undulatus") 

This returns a two-row table, with PopLWRef numbers 52323 and 82366. However there are three entries for this species in the table here including the reference number 108462. This seems to be occurring quite frequently. It's entirely possible that I'm just missing something obvious, in which case I apologize in advance! Cheers, Shaun

[wraymond]

Hello, I am having the same issue. When I run my whole list I get a and b values for some species, but after spot checking a few species they have a b values on fish base but are not getting imported. Example: length_weight("Pholis laeta")

Thanks!

[sckott]

@shaunpwilkinson sorry for the delay in response on this 😞 this does work now - we just updated to a March version of the fishbase database, so that's I assume the difference

length_weight("Balistapus undulatus") %>% 
  dplyr::select(sciname, PopLWRef)
#>                sciname PopLWRef
#> 1 Balistapus undulatus    52323
#> 2 Balistapus undulatus    82366
#> 3 Balistapus undulatus   108462

[sckott]

@wraymond can you show the page on Fishbase website that shows the data you should be seeing here?

[wraymond]

Yeah. http://www.fishbase.org/summary/Pholis-laeta.html. a and b values are under the "Estimates of some properties based on models" heading

[sckott]

@wraymond you can see with Balistapus Ωundulatus http://www.fishbase.org/summary/Balistapus-undulatus.html that it has a link for a page called Length-weight

that goes here http://www.fishbase.org/popdyn/LWRelationshipList.php?ID=6025&GenusName=Balistapus&SpeciesName=undulatus&fc=445 and has the data.

BUT your taxon doesn't have that link/page - so is missing the data in rfishbase as well

[wraymond]

Ah I see. It makes sense that such a page is required for automated import. So as of now there is no way to import the values in the "Estimates of some properties based on models" fields?

Thanks

[sckott]

we don't scrape their website. so it's a bit misleading perhaps to go from looking at their website to this R package. This package interacts with a dump of the database behind the Fishbase website. It seems that text you want is not in the database, at least not in that database table.