Arctic char
Salvelinus alpinus
— Where the name comes from
Salvelinus is a Latinisation of the German Saibling, the Bavarian name of these fish; alpinus names the Alps, which are only the southern edge of its range. It is the freshwater fish that lives furthest north of all: it is found in lakes in Greenland and Svalbard where no other fish survives.
— Facts
- Group
- Fish · Actinopterygii · Chondrichthyes
- Order
- Salmonids
- Habitat
- Deep cold lakes, Arctic streams, the sea in migratory populations
- Range
- The circumpolar Arctic, the Alps, Scandinavia, Iceland, Canada
- Size
- 25–50 cm, up to 100 cm; 0.3–5 kg, records over 12 kg
- Diet
- Crustaceans, insects, fish
- Lifespan
- 20 years, some over 40
— Characteristics
- 01
The belly of breeding males turns bright orange-red.
- 02
In Alpine lakes it lives down to two hundred metres.
- 03
Some populations run to the sea, others never leave the lake.
— What sets it apart
The char of Alpine lakes are castaways of the ice age. When the glaciers withdrew, the populations that ran up the rivers were shut into mountain lakes and never left: for ten thousand years they have bred in isolation, and in many lakes they have developed different forms living in the same water without interbreeding — one feeding on plankton at the surface, one grubbing the bottom, sometimes a third that eats fish. It is one of the natural laboratories most used for studying how a new species begins.
