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Fifteen-spined stickleback

Spinachia spinachia

Spinachia spinachia (Linnaeus, 1758) · Gasterosteidae WoRMS 126508

Reference photos

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A very slender fish with 14-17 isolated spines along the back in front of the dorsal fin, a tapering snout with a tiny mouth, and a long narrow tail stalk ending in a small rounded tail fin. Brown or olive above and paler below, sometimes with dark bars on the flanks. It lives singly or in pairs among weed on shorelines and in inshore water less than 20 m deep.

Depth

Shallow inshore water, recorded between 1 and 6 m and generally less than 20 m deep

Size

Up to 25 cm long, with a maximum recorded standard length of 22 cm

Habitat

Weedy shorelines and shallow coastal water, marine and extending into brackish water

Behaviour

Lives singly or in pairs; the male builds a nest of algal fragments glued with a kidney secretion, then tends the eggs and guards the nest

Diet

I eat

  • Small invertebrates, recorded for both juveniles and adults
  • Bottom-living crustaceans, including isopods and barnacles
  • Planktonic crustaceans, especially mysid shrimps and copepods

Eats me

  • Harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena)

Where you'd find it

Mostly seen in the English Channel and the Irish Sea, and only here and there elsewhere.

ChannelCeltic SeaNorth SeaIrish SeaW of IrelandW of Scotland
Often seenNow and thenWhere 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.

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