Soleya: a popular fish cake and its life in the wild (7 photos)

When you live your whole life under pressure, when the environment itself crushes you with tens of kilograms of water, you involuntarily bend under the changing world. And you know, it's not always bad! Look at the European solea. This fish stopped fighting the inexorable forces of nature and decided to go sideways where it couldn't squeeze through straight.





Your face when you need to get to work after the January holidays.

Despite the one-sidedness, the animal is really doing great. The address of registration is the very comfortable coasts of the Old World - from Norway to North Africa. Even though the sun rarely shines over foggy Albion and the Scandinavian Peninsula, this does not spoil the mood of the fish. On the contrary, the soleya looks forward with optimism. More precisely, up. In fairness, its anatomy does not allow it to look in other directions.



Someone who will never look down on you.

As you have guessed from the characteristic profile, the soleya is a relative of flounders. And the life of any flounder is arranged in such a way that as soon as you grow up, everything becomes a sideways thing for you. The gaze, along with the eyes, slides to one side of the body. And here you are, already at the bottom, lying on your side and waiting for something good to fall on you. For people, such a strategy is a path to depression, but for the Solea, it is a very effective survival strategy!





If you have ever wondered how such fish swim, here is the answer. They push themselves from the water column with wave-like movements.

On sandbanks, the lazybones are completely invisible thanks to excellent camouflage and self-digging skills... self-burying in the sand, that is. With its eyes turned to the sky, the beast waits for the night to make sure its insidious attack hits.



Excuse me, could you please ask your carpet to look at me less intently.

Worms, mollusks and crustaceans that dare to walk under the moon risk ending up in the jaws of an aggressive sea carpet. On protein-rich food, the soles grow up to 70 cm. But this does not prevent them from remaining flat, like the soles of flip-flops.



Solea is also called sea sole or sea tongue. I think there is no need to explain why.

Not all of the life of these fish is spent in the spirit of Egyptian painting. In order to go to bed, future soles must go through several stages of development. The first stage is the egg. For five days, the babies hang limply on the sea waves in the form of a clutch. One female can send more than 30 thousand eggs on this difficult journey!



Solei begin to spawn at a size of 15 cm. The larger the female, the more eggs she can spawn.

The second stage is a standard fry. A baby solei, just hatched from an egg, is no different from a baby of any other fish. The eyes begin to crawl upward only after a month of life. It is at this moment that the fish goes into a horizontal plane.



This is roughly how the process of moving the face along the head occurs for all representatives of the flounder order.

But this is only until the moment when the shadow of a fishing trawler falls on the fish's eyes. Solea has a tasty and high-quality fillet. Having had a hearty lunch, it moves on further along the food chain. Fortunately, the transition of the entire fish population to dinner tables is not expected. Solea turned out to be suitable for "domestication". Millions of akimbo salts are grown in aquaculture, allowing the rest of the species to quietly knead their sides in the wild.