Snakehead: zombie fish from the Amur River crushed the rivers of America (10 photos)

The snakehead is the bloody Frankenstein of the fish world, breaking the laws of nature with one fin. It's a fish that breathes air and crawls on land. It can also easily lie in the ground for months and then come back to life as if nothing had happened!







I can rise from the dead. What are your abilities?

The common, or northern snakehead, is an evolutionary experiment that seems to have gone awry. Well, unless the plan was to create an eternally hungry ecological problem of 2 meters in length and weighing over 10 kilograms. Then everything turned out perfect.





Not a photo, but every dad's dream.

50 million years ago, the snakehead family evolved on the territory of modern India and Pakistan. Their evolution took place in small lakes and rivers with muddy, swampy water, where a lot of algae grows and there is critically little oxygen. Therefore, in addition to the usual passage of water through the gills, the fish learned to breathe atmospheric air.



If you look closely, you can see two holes on top of the head, past the eyes. They lead to a special chamber that is located directly above the gills and works almost like our lungs. Its walls are penetrated by tiny blood vessels, through which gas exchange occurs.

In oxygen-poor waters, the snakehead comes up to breathe every 10-15 minutes, in good running water - less often. But if the fish is completely cut off from atmospheric air, it can drown. A fish suffocating in water. It sounds absurd, but it is true. But the snakehead can spend up to 4 days outside the water.



The snakehead's lifespan out of water increases if you put it in a cool place. Theoretically, the fish can live in the refrigerator for several days to a week!

If a dried-up pond is not going to fill with water in the coming days, the snakehead has two ways to save itself. The first is to run away from problems. In the most literal sense of the word. Wriggling like an eel in a frying pan, the fish crawls from one puddle to another. At one time, it can cover almost half a kilometer! To avoid getting stuck in place during a walk, the snakehead's skin secretes mucus.



Among modern fish, the snakehead is the largest gill-breathing fish capable of moving on land. Scientists study its methods of movement on land to understand how the first amphibians came to land.

The second option is to dig a hole for yourself. Not a grave, but a bunker! Having buried itself in silt and mud to a depth of up to a meter, the snakehead secretes a bunch of mucus and goes into a stupor. The fish can remain in a canned state for several months until the rain fills the reservoir again. Then the snakehead will come to life!



I took my friend for a walk. Otherwise he'll lock himself in his hole and never see the light of day!

Not only is the snakehead impossible to kill, but it also reproduces faster than a rabbit! Spawning lasts the entire warm season, and a large female can spawn up to 200,000 eggs per year. The pair not only spawn eggs and milt, but also prepare a real nest. They clean a patch of shallow water from algae and guard the fry until they learn to get food on their own.



A caring parent and his children's fry garden.

For its phenomenal indestructibility, the snakehead is called a zombie fish in English-language sources. But there are two problems. The first is that the gill-breathing Frankenstein is not only incredibly tenacious, but also incredibly gluttonous. Any fish that is born smaller gets to be the Asian monster's dinner. At the same time, there is no way to deal with an adult snakehead. It is the alpha predator of the places where it has settled. The second problem is that the snakehead is incredibly tasty. Its meat is tender, there are almost no bones. So the Frankenfish was transported all over the world. Europe turned out to be too cold for the snakehead. The fry were released into the Volga, but they could not survive there. In Central Asia, the fish integrated into local ecosystems. So well that some fishermen do not even suspect that snakeheads were not found there before. But in the New World, our hero created a real zombie apocalypse.



Fishing with a friend.

The local ichthyofauna was not ready for the unkillable monster. Aboriginal predators began to quickly lose ground and die out. The snakehead filled many bodies of water in North America. Its catch in small rivers, like Talas, reached 10 tons - that's a lot.



Now it's clear why Americans love zombie invasion movies so much. They just really did!

To somehow stop the ecological catastrophe, they had to destroy entire lakes! Reservoirs "infected" with zombie fish were completely drained, and others were flooded with chemicals to kill all the living creatures. Now you can neither buy nor sell a snakehead in America. You can't even keep it in your aquarium! But you can and should catch it.