AT A GLANCE
- Common Name: Boarfish
- Scientific Name: Capros aper
- Category: Fish
- Subcategory: Bony Fishes
- Range: Eastern Atlantic Ocean from western Norway and the British Isles south to Senegal, the Canary Islands, and throughout the Mediterranean and Black Seas
- Habitat Type: Continental shelf edges, rocky underwater banks, and upper continental slopes from 40 to 600 meters depth, often over sandy and coralligenous seabeds
- IUCN Red List Status: Least Concern
- Lifespan: 15 to 25 years (exceptionally long-lived for a small teleost)
- Diet: Carnivorous/Planktonivorous (pelagic copepods, mysids, euphausiids, amphipods, and small benthic worms)
- Average Size/Weight: Length 10 to 16 cm (maximum 23 cm); weight 30 to 80 g
- Key Defining Feature: Diamond-shaped, highly compressed bright reddish-orange body with enormous golden eyes, sandpaper-rough ctenoid scales, and a sharp, pig-like snout with an accordion-like extendable mouth
Overview
The Boarfish (Capros aper) is an abundant, schooling teleost fish of the northeastern Atlantic continental shelves and Mediterranean deep waters. Belonging to the family Caproidae, this diamond-shaped, disc-thin fish gets its common name from its distinctive, pig-like upturned snout, which can be extended outward into an extraordinary tubular funnel to vacuum up zooplankton. Dressed in brilliant shades of coral orange and neon pink, Boarfish form massive acoustic schools along the edge of the continental shelf.
Biology and Physical Characteristics
Capros aper has an extremely high, laterally compressed, rhomboid body with a steep head profile. Its skin is covered in tiny, stiff ctenoid scales that feel remarkably rough and prickly, like fine sandpaper. The coloration is an intense, radiant reddish-orange to bright pinkish-yellow, paling to silvery-white on the abdomen. The eyes are disproportionately large and lustrous, an adaptation for vision in the dim twilight of deeper shelf waters. Its mouth is an anatomical marvel: when feeding, the premaxillary bones shoot forward, extending the jaws into a long, trumpet-like tubular snout that generates rapid suction.
Behavior and Ecology
Boarfish are gregarious, pelagic-to-demersal schooling fish that aggregate in dense layers near the seafloor by day and migrate up into the water column at night. Despite their small adult size (rarely exceeding 16 cm), they are remarkably slow-growing and long-lived, with individuals frequently exceeding 20 years of age. They feed by stalking drifting swarms of mysid shrimps and copepods, hovering almost motionless with rapid fin flutterings before shooting out their accordion-like jaws to inhale their prey in fractions of a second.
Conservation and Human Impact
The Boarfish is assessed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List. In recent decades, warming ocean temperatures have triggered an unprecedented population boom across the northeastern Atlantic, particularly around Ireland, the Celtic Sea, and the Bay of Biscay. This explosion in biomass led to the development of a commercial pelagic trawl fishery targeting boarfish for reduction into fishmeal and fish oil, though strictly regulated harvest quotas and marine food web monitoring now safeguard the stock.
Interesting Factoid
Despite measuring barely six inches in length, the little Boarfish is surprisingly ancient; individuals regularly live for more than 25 years in the cold, deep waters of the North Atlantic.