Garfish (a photo of this predator can be seen below in the pictures) not without reason claims the title of sea pike, even despite its modest appearance. In fact, this predator can be called cute. It is painted quite modestly, but tastefully. Against the background of a bright silvery belly, a contrasting dark green back looks elegant. The body is rounded, long and swept, very reminiscent of saury. The jaws of the predator are swept and sharp at the ends, and the lower one is much longer than the upper one. The mouth is as if strewn with small teeth and the caught prey has practically no chance of escaping from it. The anal and dorsal fins are closer to the tail.
Gar fish, or arrow fish, belongs to the genus Sargan. This schooling predator lives off the coast of North Africa and Europe in warm temperate waters. It is also found in the Azov, Black, Northern,Mediterranean, B altic and Barents Seas. The fish keeps close to the surface of the water. You can watch and admire a flock of garfish for a long time. They swim in undulating curves, and just suddenly they begin to rush to the water's edge, they quickly jump out of it and already writhe in air flight, sparkling with their wet silvery sides.
The garfish start such dances in two cases: either it is saving something, or it is hunting insects above the water. The latter can be called an addition to the main food of predators. They feed on small fish. The diet includes anchovy, juvenile mackerel, sprat, and they also do not disdain small crustaceans. Settlement is not typical for them, for example, in spring, garfish in the Black Sea migrate after anchovy to the Sea of Azov. During the day, as a rule, she tries to stay in deeper layers of water, and at nightfall, she rises to the very surface.
Garfish fish usually reach sexual maturity only at the 5th or 6th year of life, although some individuals can mature at the age of three. Long-term spawning begins in spring at the end of April and lasts until mid-October. Most of the garfish spawn from May to the second half of August. Three-millimeter eggs are deposited on floating objects or algae and attached to them with the help of long threads, of 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 Seathe first larvae appear in the coastal zone in early June, they keep to the upper layers of the water. They differ greatly from adults in having 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. The garfish can live for more than 13 years, but commercial catches are most often dominated by 5-9-year-old individuals. This fish has one feature: it has a green skeleton. In this regard, many have distrust about the edibility of a predator. However, there is no doubt, garfish are very tasty and fried, and dried, and s alted, and smoked. And the green color of the bones is obtained due to the pigment biliverdin, which is a metabolic product in these fish. By the way, the same bones can be seen in eelpout fish.
There are only 25 species of garfish in the world, but only the Atlantic garfish, or common garfish, is found in the Black Sea. In different countries, this fish is also called spindle, or snipe. In Finland it is a zuya fish, in Turkey it is a garfish, and in the Crimea it is a needle, although the latter is a completely different representative of the marine fauna and has nothing to do with the garfish.
