On February 15, an angler in Lixin County, Bozhou, Anhui Province, caught a very strange fish, this fish has a long "duck beak", which is one-third the length of the body, which is very similar to the mouth of a duck, but it is several times longer than the mouth of the duck, which looks very strange.
What kind of fish is this? The bozhou angler asked for help on the Internet.
It has a long duck-billed board, but the snout is on the ventral surface of the head. Seeing this photo, the first thing that came to my mind was the Yangtze River white sturgeon, which has been declared extinct. In addition to the different body colors, this "duckbill" is indeed a bit like the Yangtze River white sturgeon.
But the Yangtze River white sturgeon is extinct, so this fish should be a close relative of the white sturgeon. Some netizens looked at the relevant information and said: This is a spoon-kissed sturgeon, an exotic species native to the Mississippi River.
After investigation, spoon-kissed sturgeon and Yangtze River white sturgeon, the same belongs to the sturgeon-shaped order spoon-kissed white sturgeon family, no wonder and white sturgeon look so similar, it turns out that they belong to close relatives. However, the home of the spoon sturgeon is located in the Mississippi River Basin of the United States, and the white sturgeon lives in the Yangtze River Basin of China.
They are an ancient creature that lived on Earth 300 million years ago, and belong to the same era as dinosaurs. However, looking at the similar-looking spoon-sturgeon and white sturgeon, there is a big difference in life habits.
The Yangtze River white sturgeon is a ferocious predatory fish, mainly feeding on fish, and the temperament is extremely intense, the stress response is strong; while the spoon sturgeon belongs to a kind of fish that feeds on zooplankton, mainly eating small aquatic organisms such as fleas and rocking mosquitoes, which are somewhat similar to fathead fish.
Two different habits have also created different fates for these two ancient species. Spoon-sturgeon have a mild temperament and a wide range of sources of food, and have survived tenaciously in the process of industrialization, and have also been cultivated in large quantities in recent years. This spoon sturgeon caught by Bozhou anglers should be a product of aquaculture.
The Yangtze River white sturgeon is difficult to feed due to its violent temperament and strong stress response, which also leads to their wild individuals only existing in the natural waters of the Yangtze River, unable to be artificially farmed and bred, which is also an important reason for their extinction.
In the 1990s, the Institute of Hydrobiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences collected more than 100 20 cm long white sturgeon larvae at the mouth of the Yangtze River, but all failed to breed. For the white sturgeon, what it needs is a wider, uninstructed body of water. In today's highly developed economy, this external environment is obviously difficult to find, which may also doom the white sturgeon to say goodbye to us in a "tragic" way.
For this spoon sturgeon caught by Bozhou anglers, because of its similar appearance, many people mistake it for white sturgeon. Some anglers call this fish a "ten-year fish", and some people even see this strange fish with a strange mouth in the vegetable market, and think that someone sells rare fish.
In fact, the spoon sturgeon due to the tender meat, delicious, and more suitable for stocking, has been in many places on the spot economic fish farming, the price of a fry in a few yuan ranges from a few yuan, the price of fish meat a pound of about 30 yuan, belongs to a rather "expensive" fish species.
Therefore, if netizens see this strange-looking alien species again, don't be surprised, and don't mistake it for "Yangtze River white sturgeon"!