FishSpotterby
Back to the feed

Fish

European sea bass

Dicentrarchus labrax

Dicentrarchus labrax (Linnaeus, 1758) · Moronidae WoRMS 126975

Reference photos

Tap a photo to enlarge.

A thick-set, silvery fish with a black or blue back and two entirely separate dorsal fins, the first spiny. Young bass school together; adults keep to smaller numbers and hunt small pelagic fish.

Depth

Coastal water down to about 100 m, most often shallower than 10 m

Size

Up to 103 cm total length, commonly about 50 cm

Habitat

Demersal in the littoral zone over most kinds of bottom, and in brackish estuaries and lagoons, running some way up rivers in summer

Behaviour

Young fish school; adults are less gregarious. Enters estuaries in summer and moves offshore into deeper water in winter

Diet

I eat

  • Mainly small pelagic fish, above all mackerel, scad, anchovy and sardine
  • In British waters the recorded prey include sandeels, sprat, sand smelt and small gobies
  • Shrimps, prawns and molluscs as well as fish; juveniles take mostly invertebrates and more fish as they grow

Eats me

Where you'd find it

Mostly seen in the English Channel, the Celtic Sea and the North Sea, and only here and there elsewhere. It has not been recorded in the waters west of Ireland.

ChannelCeltic SeaNorth SeaIrish SeaW of IrelandW of Scotland
Often seenNow and thenNot recordedWhere PEBL filmsBased on marine survey records (OBIS). Blank seas can mean nobody has looked there, not that the animal is absent.

Sources

Open-access references behind this page. Every statement on this page was read out of one of them; anything that could not be traced to a source was taken off the page rather than left standing. Each link was checked on the date shown, and confirmed then to be about this species.

Name European sea bass in a clip to add it to your collection.

Spot it in the feed