artiFISHal is a pelagic fish community simulator developed using the R programming language. It can be used to create artificial lakes and populate them with known numbers of fish (identified in species-size groups) to mimic pelagic fish communities. artiFISHal can then be used to sample these fish with virtual acoustic and midwater trawl surveys. Program artiFISHal was used to evaluate several different approaches for estimating the biomass of pelagic fish species in the Great Lakes, see Yule et al. (2013) in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.