For the past decade, Tenera has been the leading commercial organisation providing icthyoplankton and juvenile fish collection, sorting, and taxonomic identification in California, Hawaii and Guam.

Tenera is currently the only company in California that can process and reliably identify hundreds of marine coastal samples per month. We have extensive marine and freshwater larval fish identification skills with fishes collected throughout California, Guam, and Hawaii. 

Processing taxonomy requires knowledge and experience combined with high quality optical systems. Our plankton taxonomy laboratories are equipped with a state-of-the-art Leica stereo and Zeiss Inverted microscopes and a Spot 3 digital camera with digital measuring capabilities. We maintain a rigorous training program for our sorters and our taxonomists. They undergo continuous blind QA/QC reviews that are fully documented and available for review by independent reviewers. Larval taxonomy requires a specialist skill set and ongoing expertise, as the identification of larval fishes is considerably more challenging than many forms of taxonomy. We have decades of experience undertaking large scale, multi-season surveys of ichthyoplankton and selected larval invertebrates in the Pacific as part of our core business servicing the coastal power plant sector.