Larval survival is critical to the recruitment variability of fish. Some field observations have shown a positive relationship between zooplankton and larval fish density, suggesting that prey concentration plays an important role in larval survival. However, in the majority of those studies, zooplankton data were collected using plankton nets of mesh size > 200 um; those zooplankton are too large to be the potential prey for larval fish. According to gut content analyses of larval fish, the most abundant prey have size about 50-80 um. Hence, we aim to focus on the small size (50-200um) zooplankton community and hypothesize the density of small-size zooplankton is positively correlated with larval survival. We used 50um, 330um, and 1000um mesh size nets to collect the small-size zooplankton, copepods (adults) and larval fishes respectively. Larval fish show a positive relationship with small-size zooplankton (although not statistically significant, p=0.148) but no relationship with adult copepods densities (p=0.423). Thus, in the East China Sea, small-size (50-200um) zooplankton may be a better proxy for larval fish survival than mesozooplankton.