''Larimichthys crocea'', commonly called the large yellow croaker, yellow croaker or croceine croaker, is a
species of
saltwater fish in the
family Sciaenidae, native to the
marginal seas of
East Asia from western
Japan
Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...
and
Korea to the
Yellow Sea,
East China Sea
The East China Sea is an arm of the Western Pacific Ocean, located directly offshore from East China. It covers an area of roughly . The sea’s northern extension between mainland China and the Korean Peninsula is the Yellow Sea, separated b ...
,
Taiwan Strait and northern
South China Sea. It generally thrives in
temperate coastal waters and often also in brackish
estuaries, and is found on muddy-sandy bottoms.
Males can reach , but a common size is .
Once an abundant
commercial fish off
East and
South China
South China () is a geographical and cultural region that covers the southernmost part of China. Its precise meaning varies with context. A notable feature of South China in comparison to the rest of China is that most of its citizens are not n ...
,
Taiwan,
South Korea and Japan, its population collapsed in the 1970s due to
overfishing
Overfishing is the removal of a species of fish (i.e. fishing) from a body of water at a rate greater than that the species can replenish its population naturally (i.e. the overexploitation of the fishery's existing fish stock), resulting in th ...
. Fishing boats landed 56,000 tonnes of ''Larimichthys crocea'' in 2008, and 91,000 tonnes in 2013.
The species is now
aquafarmed in China, and production has grown to 105,000 tonnes by 2013.
[ Farms have experienced outbreaks of '']Nocardia seriolae
''Nocardia'' is a genus of weakly staining Gram-positive, catalase, catalase-positive, rod-shaped bacteria. It forms partially acid-fast beaded branching filaments (acting as fungi, but being truly bacteria). It contains a total of 85 species. ...
'' infections.
''L. crocea'' is an important enough commercial species to have its genome mapped in 2014. On 6 January 2015 it became the 200th organism to have its genome annotated by the NCBI Eukaryotic Genome Annotation Pipeline.[ ]
References
Sciaenidae
Commercial fish
Fish of the Pacific Ocean
Fish described in 1846
{{Sciaenidae-stub