Sevan trout: habitat, description, photo

There is a magnificent big lake in the high mountains of the Caucasus. It is located at an altitude of 1900 meters above sea level. The lake is called Sevan. Armenia is the country in whose territory it is located.

It is the lake that is the habitat of the fish called Sevan trout. By the way, it is highly appreciated by fishermen. In addition to Lake Sevan, trout, a photo of which is presented in the article, is found in nearby rivers.

Description

Let's talk about this fish in more detail. What is it? Sevan is a special kind of trout. Its name comes from the Latin salmo ischchan. In Armenian, the word ishkhan means "king". So she was named for beauty and greatness compared to the rest of the fish. After all, some of its individuals can reach in weight up to seventeen kilograms. Sometimes there is a Sevan trout, the length of which is one meter. As you can see, a real giant! Even in the fifteenth century, this fish was transported to various countries of the East.

Scientists also Sevan trout, the photo of which is in the article, is divided into four types, or, in other words, the race. And they all have differences from European trout.

Winter Ishkhan

So, one of the species of this trout is called winter ishkhan. Sometimes it is called winter bahtak. This type of trout is the largest. There were cases when the caught individual was seventeen kilograms, and its length was 104 centimeters. Impressive size! Then when the winter ishana foraging, its color is silvery white, and the back has a color of the color of steel. There are few dark spots, and they are surrounded by a rim along the edge, of a light color. At the same time, they are never more appropriate if compared with trout. Food winter ishshana are crustaceans, amphibians whose habitat is the bottom of the reservoir.

The age of ripening of this species of trout is four or five years. At a time when the fish start spawning, the males change their color. They darken significantly, and their fins become almost entirely black. On the sides they have a few red spots, and the light rims on the other spots are quite distinct. Females remain unchanged. The spawning takes place directly in the lake itself. The number of eggs can be up to four thousand. Before the fall of the lake level, two herds of fish were allocated: one spawned from October to January, and the other spawned from January to March. At the same time spawning took place at different depths. The first depth was 0.5-4 meters, and the second - 0.5-20 meters.

Winter bahtak is especially appreciated by fishermen. It used to be an important object of fishing. However, after the level of Lake Sevan fell, many spawning grounds remained on the shore. So now this type of fish is rare.

Summer Ishkhan

The second type of Sevan trout is a summer ishkhan. This fish is also called summer bahtak. It was called so because the eggs are laid in spring or summer time. Its spawning takes place in the rivers Bakhtak-tea and Gedak-Bulah, and also in the Sevan itself, in the pre-estuary areas of the lake. This type of trout is smaller. Its weight, if you take the maximum, reaches two kilograms, and the length is about 60 centimeters. The summer ishkhan ripens at the age of 2-7 years. This type is a less prolific species of trout.

This fish can put a little more than a thousand eggs into spawning. Often on the sides of the summer bug flies you can see red spots. The fishery stock of this species is shrinking every year due to the fact that the path to the spawning site turned out to be almost closed.

Bojack

Another subspecies of the Sevan trout is the bodjak. This is a dwarf species of trout, and its dimensions are quite small. It is known that the largest caught individual did not reach a length of thirty centimeters. And their average length varies from 24 to 26 cm. Usually, males of the bogak often have red spots on their sides.

Spawning in this species of trout occurs only in Lake Sevan (Armenia).
Having reached the age of three or four years, she begins to go on spawning. It should be said that while it does not build nests to lay eggs, but mows it throughout the bottom of the Sevan. Nerestitsya bucket from October to November. And scientists earlier believed that this process occurs at a depth of about fifteen meters, but after the drying of the coastal zones, spawning grounds of the bodjack were found at a depth of forty meters. However, their area is rather small and can not resume the lost coastal areas in any way, and therefore the number of this fish has sharply decreased.

Gegharkuni

Well, the last subspecies of Sevan trout is called Gegharkuni. Young growth resembles that of other salmons. Their coloring has a slightly different shape than the rest of the species of Sevan trout. Gegharkuni has dark transverse bands on its body and brownish-yellow and red spots. The feeding takes place after a year in the lake. Their color is darker than that of Ishkhan, but the shade is also silvery.

Its food is not only benthos, but also zooplankton, located mainly in the water column and moving along the current. This is different from other types of trout. It only spawns exclusively in running water, that is, in rivers.

Sevan trout: number

In the 1920s, artificial breeding of summer Ishkhan and Gegharkuni began. Up to the middle of the fortieth years, the fishing stock was estimated at 1.6 million individuals. However, further the conditions of living in the rivers of young animals have significantly worsened, and the path to spawning has actually been blocked. In view of this, after the fifties, the Gegharkun and the summer Ishkhan began to be planted only in hatcheries.

Despite all the measures taken to preserve the number of Sevan trout, the collection of eggs at the fish-breeding plants was reduced. All these conditions, including the lowering of the water level, and the reduction of the natural spawning grounds for fish, led to a sharp decrease in the number of all species.

Eutrophication made a significant contribution to all this. Eutrophication is the increase in the primary productivity of water due to the increase in them of nutrients, such as mainly fluorine and nitrogen. These components can be introduced into reservoirs through industrial and municipal wastewater, after flushing from the fertilizer fields or with precipitation, for example. At first this can be beneficial for fish, since the food is getting bigger. However, after all this, the water quality deteriorates. The coastal zone begins to overgrow, the water becomes cloudy, the transparency becomes smaller, and, accordingly, the oxygen level also decreases.

Species that are on the verge of extinction

In a particularly difficult situation, due to the changes that take place in the lake and other water bodies, there were the largest and the smallest species of trout, the bodjak and the winter ishkhan. This fish spawns in the lake itself. These species were threatened with complete extinction. And so the fish called Sevan trout was declared a reserve and listed in the Red Book.