Most fishermen, including those who pride themselves on rich experience and serious trophies, cannot immediately remember what a small Mohtik fish looks like or where it lives. So it would not be superfluous to talk about her in order to fill this gap in knowledge.
Habitat
For starters, it’s worth saying that mohtik fish (photos are presented as illustrations in the article) is a variety of a much more famous fishing trophy in our country - dace. It received this name mainly in the Yamalo-Nenets and Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrugs. Its other local name is megdym.
Found mostly in rivers, but also occasionally caught in lakes. Prefers ponds with dense soil - coarse sand or small pebbles.
Unlike the dace that lives in the European part of Russia, it keeps not in small flocks or singly, but in huge flocks. This is especially noticeable during spring and autumn migration - to the upper reaches for spawning and back. At this time, flocks of mohtika can reach really gigantic sizes - many hundreds of thousands of individuals.
No wonder somerivers in Siberia were named after this amazing fish - Eltsovka, Eltsovaya and others.
Appearance
Outwardly, the mokhtik looks like a dace, which, in fact, it is. The body is elongated, slightly flattened. Similar to roach or ide, but significantly inferior to them in size. In most cases, small individuals are caught - up to 20 centimeters long and weighing no more than 120 grams.
However, in some streams, real giants still sometimes come across - they talk about individuals weighing up to 450 grams! For such, local peoples even came up with a separate name - "mokhtar", which distinguishes them from a pack of small brothers.
Color can vary significantly, primarily depending on the color and nature of the bottom in the area where the fish was born and raised. Also has some attention to the appearance of the temperature at which it developed.
But most often there are fish with bright gray sides that have a slightly bluish tint. The belly is silvery, light, almost white. But the back is dark, has a metallic tint - in order not to catch the eye of a bird of prey that can attack from above. The dorsal and caudal fins are dark grey, while the ventral and anal fins are yellow, in some cases even bright orange.
Basic diet
In food, the mohtik cannot boast of fastidiousness - it eats almost any prey that catches its eye and fits in size. It mainly feeds on small invertebrates - molluscs, caddisfly larvae, bloodworms and other smallworms.
In summer, the diet is greatly enriched by surface insects. Mohtik willingly grabs mayflies, mosquitoes, midges, grasshoppers that carelessly fell into the water.
Therefore, we can say with confidence that he lives in different layers of water - from the bottom to the top.
Eating
Some connoisseurs rightly consider mohtik one of the most delicious fish in Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug. Unlike the usual dace, it is thicker, fattening well by the end of summer. Therefore, the fish is perfect for frying and s alting. The meat is very tender, tasty, for which it is highly valued by true gourmets.
However, when eating fish that has not undergone heat treatment, you should be careful. Experienced fishermen are always interested: is mohtik an opisthorchiasis fish or not? The fact is that many species of fish are susceptible to attacks by opisthorchiasis parasitic worms. And mohtik is one of them, as well as carp, roach, bream, tench, dace, ram.
Opisthorchiasis are quite dangerous - when they enter the human body, the eggs develop successfully, and the hatched worms deal a serious blow to the liver, gradually destroying it, turning a strong, he althy, flowering person into an invalid.
There is no such danger when eating well-done fish, but s alted, uncooked fish can cause many serious problems. So, before eating it, you should find out if there have been recent cases of illness in the vicinity of the places where the fish were caught.
Reproduction
Mohtik begins to breed at the age of two years, when it reaches a size of about 10-12 centimeters. Spawning is protracted - from mid-March to the end of May. First of all, it depends on the weather in a particular year, the temperature of the water in the river. For spawning, the fish rises to the upper reaches of the rivers, often entering deep, quiet backwaters and even small lakes. In some cases, the river banks flooded in the flood, meadows with thick grass become a place. But most often, mohtik prefers to spawn near large stones, on sandy soil, as well as near algae, snags.
One large, adult female can lay up to 18,000 eggs at a time. The eggs are quite large - up to 1.5 millimeters in diameter, yellow, sometimes rich amber in color.
Conclusion
This concludes our article. Now you know more about mohtik fish - a photo and description will allow even a beginner to easily identify it, not to be confused with dace, and even more so with roach or ram. So, you will become an even more interesting and versatile conversationalist.
