Most of the research on marking of aquatic organisms has been done using large organisms since they tend to have better retention rates, their swimming behaviour is less affected by the size of the tag, they have less trauma due to injectable tags or from the injector itself and they are easier to handle and able to withstand the stress of tagging and recapture. The development of small tags has grown from a necessity to study smaller fish species, earlier life stages of fish and to study other small aquatic organisms. As an endangered species, delta smelt (Hypomesus transpacificus) are being intensively studied in the upper San Francisco Estuary (CA, USA). A crucial part of many of these studies is tracking delta smelt, which requires a distinctive mark on each individual or group of fish. Unfortunately, many of the experimental fish suffer inadvertent mortality, as delta smelt are very sensitive to environmental and handling stress. The purpose of this review was to synthesize the different tagging and marking studies on small fish and aquatic organisms and to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each method for applications on sensitive species such as delta smelt. This review suggests the most effective methods for tracking delta smelt are visible implant alphanumeric (VIA) tagging and adipose fin clips for subadult to adult fish and calcein marks for young life stages. Among these methods, only VIA tagging currently provides individual organism identification.

中文翻译：

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小鱼的鱼类鉴定方法综述

大多数关于水生生物标记的研究都是使用大型生物完成的，因为它们往往具有更好的保留率，它们的游泳行为受标签尺寸的影响较小，由于可注射标签或注射器本身而受到的创伤较小。而且它们更易于操作，并且能够承受标记和重新捕获的压力。小型标签的发展已从研究小型鱼类，鱼类早期生命阶段以及研究其他小型水生生物的必要性发展而来。作为一种濒临灭绝的物种，三角洲熔炼（Hypomesus transpacificus）正在旧金山上游河口（美国，加利福尼亚州）进行深入研究。这些研究中的关键部分是跟踪三角洲熔炼，这需要在每条鱼类或每条鱼类上都有独特的标记。不幸的是，由于三角洲冶炼对环境和处理压力非常敏感，许多实验鱼都遭受了无意中的死亡。这篇综述的目的是对小鱼和水生生物进行不同的标记和标记研究，并评估每种方法在敏感物种（如三角洲冶炼）上的应用的优缺点。这项审查表明，跟踪三角洲熔炼的最有效方法是可见的植入物字母数字（VIA）标记和脂肪鳍夹，用于成年鱼的成体和幼年钙黄绿素标记。在这些方法中，