The importance of inshore marine habitats as nursery areas for juvenile marine fish species has been well reported. Studies in other parts of the world have described seasonal variation in shallow water fish assemblages. Little was known however, about annual, seasonal, and daily variation in fish abundance in Alaska. Understanding the responses of fish populations at this scale are critical for examining finer-scale processes such as trophic interactions. Responses at these scales also put inter-decadal changes into perspective, and it is changes at the decadal scale that are rapidly becoming the focus of fishery oceanographers. The graph below shows seasonal patterns of abundance for several key forage fish taxa. These changes in abundance throughout a season are important considerations when designing a beach seine study plan. For example, if we only sampled in August we would have concluded that Gadids (cod etc) were very important, whereas in May they would not have been. The opposite would have been true of the sculpins (Cottidae).