''Coryphaenoides rupestris'' is a species of marine

ray-finned fish Actinopterygii (; ), members of which are known as ray-finned fishes, is a class of bony fish. They comprise over 50% of living vertebrate species. The ray-finned fishes are so called because their fins are webs of skin supported by bony or hor ...

in the

family Family (from la, familia) is a Social group, group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or Affinity (law), affinity (by marriage or other relationship). The purpose of the family is to maintain the well-being of its ...

Macrouridae Macrouridae is a family of deep sea fish, a diverse and ecologically important group, which are part of the order of cod-like fish, the Gadiformes. The species in the Macrouridae are characterised by their large heads which normally have a singl ...

. Its common names include the rock grenadier, the roundnose grenadier and the roundhead rat-tail. In France it is known as ''grenadier de roche'' and in Spain as ''granadero de roca''. It is a large, deep-water species and is fished commercially in the northern Atlantic Ocean.

Description

The roundnose grenadier is a deep water fish sometimes reaching over a metre (yard) in length. The rounded head is large with a broad snout, the abdomen small and the tail long and tapering to a pointed tip. At the front of the snout there is a blunt, tube-like scute or scale and there is a small barbel under the chin. There are three rows of small teeth at the front of the mouth but only one row at the back. The scales on the body are densely packed and covered with small spines. The dorsal fin has two spines and 8 to 11 soft rays and the pelvic fin has 7 to 8 soft rays, the outer one of which is greatly elongated. The general body colour is brownish-grey but the inside of the mouth, the orbits round the eyes, the gill cavities and the fins are dark brownish black.''Coryphaenoides rupestris'' Gunnerus, 1765
FishBase. Retrieved 2012-05-04.Species fact sheet: ''Coryphaenoides rupestris'' (Gunnerus, 1765)
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Retrieved 2012-05-04

Distribution

The roundnose grenadier is found in the northern Atlantic Ocean at depths between and occasionally at much greater depths. It tends to spend the summer in deep waters and the winter in shallower locations. Its range normally extends from

Baffin Island Baffin Island (formerly Baffin Land), in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, is the largest island in Canada and the fifth-largest island in the world. Its area is , slightly larger than Spain; its population was 13,039 as of the 2021 Canadia ...

Greenland Greenland ( kl, Kalaallit Nunaat, ; da, Grønland, ) is an island country in North America that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland is t ...

Iceland Iceland ( is, Ísland; ) is a Nordic island country in the North Atlantic Ocean and in the Arctic Ocean. Iceland is the most sparsely populated country in Europe. Iceland's capital and largest city is Reykjavík, which (along with its s ...

and

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and t ...

south to the

New England Seamounts The New England Seamounts is a chain of over twenty underwater extinct volcanic mountains known as seamounts. This chain is located off the coast of Massachusetts in the Atlantic Ocean and extends over 1,000 km from the edge of Georges Ban ...

and North Africa. It is found on

continental shelves A continental shelf is a portion of a continent that is submerged under an area of relatively shallow water, known as a shelf sea. Much of these shelves were exposed by drops in sea level during glacial periods. The shelf surrounding an island ...

and in the vicinity of

seamount A seamount is a large geologic landform that rises from the ocean floor that does not reach to the water's surface (sea level), and thus is not an island, islet or cliff-rock. Seamounts are typically formed from extinct volcanoes that rise abru ...

s and knolls.

Biology

The roundnose grenadier sometimes forms dense shoals at depths of about . It makes a daily vertical migration, returning later to the seabed where it feeds on small invertebrates including

shrimp Shrimp are crustaceans (a form of shellfish) with elongated bodies and a primarily swimming mode of locomotion – most commonly Caridea and Dendrobranchiata of the decapod order, although some crustaceans outside of this order are refer ...

amphipods Amphipoda is an order of malacostracan crustaceans with no carapace and generally with laterally compressed bodies. Amphipods range in size from and are mostly detritivores or scavengers. There are more than 9,900 amphipod species so far descri ...

and

cumacea Cumacea is an order of small marine crustaceans of the superorder Peracarida, occasionally called hooded shrimp or comma shrimp. Their unique appearance and uniform body plan makes them easy to distinguish from other crustaceans. They live in so ...

ns, and to a lesser extent,

cephalopod A cephalopod is any member of the molluscan class Cephalopoda (Greek plural , ; "head-feet") such as a squid, octopus, cuttlefish, or nautilus. These exclusively marine animals are characterized by bilateral body symmetry, a prominent head ...

s and various fishes, including

lanternfish Lanternfishes (or myctophids, from the Greek μυκτήρ ''myktḗr'', "nose" and ''ophis'', "serpent") are small mesopelagic fish of the large family Myctophidae. One of two families in the order Myctophiformes, the Myctophidae are represente ...

es. The roundnose grenadier is a batch spawner and is believed to migrate to the vicinity of Iceland to spawn in late summer or autumn. The females reach maturity when they are nine to eleven years old and the males when they are rather younger. Up to 35,000 eggs can be produced at a time.

Fishery

Commercial fishing Commercial fishing is the activity of catching fish and other seafood for commercial profit, mostly from wild fisheries. It provides a large quantity of food to many countries around the world, but those who practice it as an industry must often ...

for the roundnose grenadier started in the 1960s. The former

USSR The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populous ...

, and the

German Democratic Republic German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...

were the main countries involved, sending

factory ship A factory ship, also known as a fish processing vessel, is a large ocean-going vessel with extensive on-board facilities for processing and freezing caught fish or whales. Modern factory ships are automated and enlarged versions of the earlier wh ...

s to undertake midwater trawls in the Atlantic Ocean. Catches peaked at over in 1971. More recently, French and Spanish vessels have predominated and the total annual catch has been under in most years since 1980. The flesh of the fish is white with a pleasant texture and is sold as

seafood Seafood is any form of sea life regarded as food by humans, prominently including fish and shellfish. Shellfish include various species of molluscs (e.g. bivalve molluscs such as clams, oysters and mussels, and cephalopods such as octopus an ...

. In 2010 in the United Kingdom, the roundnose grenadier was listed as a "UK Priority Species" for conservation purposes on the grounds that it is a long-lived fish taking many years to mature and that numbers were declining. It was suggested that if no actions to conserve the fish were taken, it would become

extinct Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...

within the next 10 years.UK Priority Species: ''Coryphaenoides rupestris''
Joint Nature Conservation Committee. Retrieved 2012-05-05.

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q2176319 Macrouridae Fish described in 1765 Fish of the Atlantic Ocean Taxa named by Johan Ernst Gunnerus