Striped barb
| Striped barb | ||||||||||||
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Striped barbel ( Mullus surmuletus ) |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Mullus surmuletus | ||||||||||||
| Linnaeus , 1758 |
The striped barbel ( Mullus surmuletus ) is a perch-related marine fish that is found in the northeast Atlantic from Senegal and the Canary Islands to the coasts of the British Isles and southern Norway. It also lives in the Mediterranean , the Black Sea and, more rarely, in the North Sea and the Skagerrak . The fish stay at depths of 5 to 400 meters.
features
Striped barbel usually grows to 10 inches long. The maximum length is 40 centimeters. You then have a weight of one kilogram. Females grow slightly larger than males. The head profile of the striped mullet is less steep than that of the red mullet . Their coloring is variable, the sides patterned by reddish and yellow-brown vertical stripes. The belly is silvery white. Your two goatees are longer than the pectoral fins. The first, hard-radiating dorsal fin has a dark brown stripe.
Way of life
Striped barbs live close to the ground, mainly on coarse stone, but also on sandy and muddy soils, mostly at depths of 5 to 60 meters, in the eastern Ionian Sea also at depths of 300 to 400 meters. Young fish live in large schools, adult animals tend to live in small groups or (rarely) alone. They look for their food consisting of small crustaceans, worms, molluscs and small fish with the help of their barbels, which are equipped with taste and touch cells, and are often accompanied when looking for food by alien fish, especially wrasse and sea bream , which eat the scared bottom animals.
As a result of the increasing water temperatures in the northern Atlantic due to climate change, the range of the species has gradually expanded further north.
Reproduction
Striped barbel spawn from April to July. Populations south of the Atlantic often move to the English Channel for this purpose . The eggs are 0.85 to 0.93 mm in diameter. The eggs and the 2 mm long larvae that hatch after three days float pelagically in the water and are often drifted far away by the ocean currents. The animals hatched in the English Channel end up in the North Sea and the Skagerrak. With a size of three centimeters the juvenile fish go to life near the ground, with three years they are sexually mature.
literature
- 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 .
- Matthias Bergbauer, Bernd Humberg: What lives in the Mediterranean? 1999, Franckh-Kosmos Verlag, ISBN 3-440-07733-0
- Hans A. Baensch , Robert A. Patzner: Mergus Sea Water Atlas Volume 7 Perciformes (Perciformes) , Mergus-Verlag, Melle, 1998, ISBN 3-88244-107-0
Web links
- Striped barbel on Fishbase.org (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Mark R. Payne: Climate change at the dinner table. In: Nature . Volume 497, No. 7449, 2013, pp. 320-321, doi: 10.1038 / 497320a