Candle fish
| Candle fish | ||||||||||||
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Candlefish ( Thaleichthys pacificus ) |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name of the genus | ||||||||||||
| Thaleichthys | ||||||||||||
| Girard , 1858 | ||||||||||||
| Scientific name of the species | ||||||||||||
| Thaleichthys pacificus | ||||||||||||
| ( Richardson , 1836) |
The candle fish or eulachon ( Thaleichthys pacificus ) is a fish belonging to the smelt family that is found in the eastern North Pacific from St. Matthew Island and Kuskokwim Bay in the Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands to Monterey Bay in California .
features
The candle fish reaches a body length of up to 30 centimeters. The skin is silvery with a bluish-brown back. Candlefish feed on plankton . To spawn, they migrate up to 160 kilometers upstream into fresh water.
use
The candle fish is a good food fish and, because of its high fat content of around 15 percent by weight, was also used by the Indians to extract fish oil . To do this, the raw fish were fermented in a pit and then boiled in water so that the fat rose and could be skimmed off. Whole, dried candle fish were clamped between wooden logs or burned with a wick as a light source.
literature
- William N. Eschmeyer, Earl S. Herald, Howard Hamann: A field guide to Pacific Coast Fishes of North America. From the Gulf of Alaska to Baja California (Peterson Field Guides; 28). Houghton Mifflin, Boston, Mass. 1983, ISBN 0-395-33188-9 .
Web links
- Candle fish on Fishbase.org (English)
- Thaleichthys pacificus inthe IUCN 2013 Red List of Threatened Species . Listed by: NatureServe, 2012. Retrieved December 2, 2013.