Fish sargan - one of the contenders for the role of sea pike

Fish sargan (photo of this predator can be seen below in the pictures) not without reason claims to be a sea pike even in spite of its modest appearance. In fact, this predator can be called cute. It is painted rather modestly, but with taste. Against the background of a bright silvery abdomen, the contrasting dark green back looks elegant. The body is round, long and arrow-shaped, very much like a saury. The jaws of the predator are sagittate and sharp at the ends, and the lower one is much longer than the upper one. The mouth seems to be strewn with small teeth and the caught prey has practically no chance of escaping it. Anal and dorsal fins are located closer to the tail.

Fish sargan, or fish-arrow, refers to the genus Sarganov. This gregarious predator inhabits the shores of North Africa and Europe in temperate warm waters. It also occurs in the Azov, Black, Northern, Mediterranean, Baltic and Barents seas. The fish keep close to the surface of the water. A flock of sarganes can be watched and admired for a long time. They swim in undulating bends, and only suddenly they begin to rush to the edge of the water, as they jump out of it swiftly and already wriggle in an air flight, sparkling with their wet silvery sides.

Such dances fish sargan starts in two cases: either she is saving something, or hunts over water for insects. The latter can be called an addition to the main food of predators. They feed on small fishes. The ration includes hamsa, juvenile mackerel, sprat, and small crustaceans, they also do not disdain. Settlement is uncharacteristic for them, for example, in the spring the fish of the sargan in the Black Sea migrates after the anchovy to the Sea of Azov. In the daytime, as a rule, it tries to stay in the deeper layers of water, and with the onset of darkness it rises to the surface itself.

Sexual maturity of the fish sargan usually reaches only the 5th or 6th year of life, although individual individuals can ripen and at the age of three. Long-term spawning begins in the spring in late April and lasts until mid-October. Most of the sarganes sweep their eggs from May to the second half of August. Three-millimeter eggs are deposited on floating objects or algae and attached to them using long threads, which they have at least 60 pieces. The development of eggs depends on the water temperature. It can last from 10 days to 5 weeks.

In the Black Sea, the first larvae appear in the coastal zone in early June, they keep the upper layers of water. From adults, they are much different than the shorter jaws. At the end of the first year of their life, small predators acquire a typical appearance for their species and begin to retreat to the depths. Sargans can survive for more than 13 years, but in commercial catches, 5-9-year-olds usually predominate. This fish has one feature: it has a green skeleton. In this regard, many people are distrustful of the predator's edibility. However, there is no doubt, sargans are very tasty and fried, and dried, and salted, and smoked. And the green color of bones is obtained because of the pigment of biliverdin, which is a metabolic product of these fish. By the way, the same bones can be seen in fish beljudugi.

In the world there are only 25 species of sargan, but in the Black Sea only sargan is found Atlantic, or ordinary. In different countries this fish is also called a spindle, or snipe. In Finland, it is zui-fish, in Turkey - a fish-barren, and in Crimea - a needle, although the latter is a completely different representative of marine fauna and has nothing to do with sargan.