Rotan: a voracious and hardy fish (7 photos)

Interesting information about the life of fish, familiar to many fishing enthusiasts.





And rotans rebelled from the waters of the Amur, and a war began to destroy European ecosystems... No one expected the modest Far Eastern fish to begin their victorious march around the world. But terminators with gills are already moving across Eurasia. They are voracious, they adapt, they spread like a virus!

The name of the fish speaks for itself - rotan has a very wide mouth for such a small body. 25 hungry centimeters of this beast actively terrorize any pond, lake or any other body of water with slow movement of water masses.



Once in new waters, rotan quickly reconnoiters the situation and determines its diet. This happens according to the old principle: everything that fits into your mouth is useful. And as we remember, the mouth of a fish is what you need. Therefore, absolutely everything goes to rotans for lunch: from insects and their larvae to crustaceans and fish. With such picky demands, rotan quickly gains mass and captures small bodies of water. The fish squeezes out the ecological niche from crucian carp, roach and dace until they completely disappear. So, in a couple of years, a small lake turns into a swamp, consisting only of rotans.



Naturally, rotan has enemies. Carp, pike, perch, pike perch - control the population of insatiable fish. But rotan will easily survive all of them if there is severe frost. Instead of a chill on the skin of rotan, glucose and glycerin run in the blood. Because of this, the internal fluids of the fish do not thicken, and rotan remains active. And if a furious minus hits, the scaly terminator will bury itself in the silt. There he is able to survive almost complete freezing of the lake. The same cannot be said about other inhabitants of reservoirs.



And this despite the fact that the homeland of rotan is the Far East. From there the fish reached Siberia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Partially, a man helped him with this. People themselves introduced fish into the central reservoirs of the country in the middle of the last century. From them, rotan moved to the largest arteries of Eurasia: the Volga, Danube, Don, Irtysh.



But rotan is also capable of independent travel. By air! The unhatched little thing uses duck, goose and other natural routes. Rotan caviar is sticky. The female leaves the clutch in shallow water. There it quickly becomes unaccounted for baggage on the feet of birds. The next time it is planted, the eggs fall off. This is how rotan fry land in new bodies of water, often deprived of serious predators.



The problem of the Rotan threat has become so serious that the animal has become persona non grata in the European Union. It cannot be imported there, cannot be bred, transported, sold, and, of course, cannot be released into the wild. The rotan silently swallowed such strict sanctions and continued to seize secluded ponds - cases of encounters with it are still recorded.



Our animal was also blacklisted and received the offensive nickname “weed.” But so far there is no full-fledged fight against rotan anywhere. The one who will unite the resistance and raise people to fight against the inexorable invader of our ponds has not yet appeared!