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Fish

Sprat

Sprattus sprattus

Sprattus sprattus (Linnaeus, 1758) · Clupeidae WoRMS 126425

Reference photos

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A shiny silver to grey schooling fish of inshore waters, with a very forked tail and a strong keel of scutes along the belly.

Depth

10 to 150 m; spawns at 10 to 20 m

Size

Up to 16 to 25.1 cm, commonly about 12 cm

Habitat

Open water inshore and over the shelf, entering estuaries down to a salinity of 4

Behaviour

Schools inshore, rising to the surface at night, and migrates between winter feeding and summer spawning grounds

Diet

I eat

  • Planktonic crustaceans, including copepods
  • Cladocerans and other small planktonic crustaceans
  • Other zooplankton, including arrow worms and larvaceans

Eats me

  • Larger predatory fish, including cod, whiting, saithe, hake and gurnards
  • Seals and small cetaceans, including harbour seal, harbour porpoise and bottlenose dolphin
  • Seabirds such as the kittiwake, and squid

Where you'd find it

Found all around Britain and Ireland, so you have a chance of seeing it anywhere on the coast.

ChannelCeltic SeaNorth SeaIrish SeaW of IrelandW of Scotland
Often seenWhere 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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