Great pipefish
| Great pipefish | ||||||||||||
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A great pipefish caught on the Belgian North Sea coast |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Syngnathus acus | ||||||||||||
| Linnaeus , 1758 |
The great pipefish ( Syngnathus acus ) is the largest pipefish species found in European waters. It was already in 1758 by Carl Linnaeus , the founder of binomial nomenclature , described and is one of the first described pipefish species.
Their distribution area includes the coasts of the Mediterranean and the eastern Atlantic and extends there from South Africa over the coast of West Africa and the European Atlantic coast to Norway, the Faroe Islands and the British Isles . The Mediterranean population has been described as a separate species, Syngnathus rubescens . Today this species is considered a synonym for Syngnathus acus .
features
The great pipefish has a very elongated, thin body and is up to half a meter long. The snout with the upper mouth is elongated like a pipette, the diameter of the snout tube is equal to or smaller than the diameter of the eye. The great pipefish is colored light green to dark brown.
As with all pipefish, the body is armored by bone plates. Between the head and the dorsal fin there are 18 to 19 bone plates. The dorsal fin is supported by 33 to 42 soft fin rays, the very short anal fin by 3. In contrast to most other pipefish, the great pipefish has a small, fan-shaped caudal fin.
Way of life
The Great pipefish lives mainly on the coasts and in estuaries on sandy, muddy bottoms and rubble bottoms, usually between algae and seagrass ( Zostera ). Mostly it stays in shallow water, at depths of a maximum of 15 meters. However, it has also been found at depths of 90 to 110 meters above scree. The greater pipefish feeds on copepods , amphipods, and other small crustaceans. The breeding season is in the summer months. The 400 or more eggs laid by the female are taken over by the male during mating, who carries them on the spongy underside of the tail for five weeks until the young sea needles hatch.
literature
- Rudie H. Kuiter : Seahorses: pipefish, shredded fish and their relatives . Ulmer (Eugen), 2001, ISBN 3-80013-244-3 .
- Bent J. Muus, Jørgen G. Nielsen: The marine fish of Europe in the North Sea, Baltic Sea and Atlantic. Kosmos, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-440-07804-3 .
Web links
- Large pipefish on Fishbase.org (English)