A blunt-headed silver fish in schools at the surface of harbors and lagoons, jumping clear of the water repeatedly for reasons nobody has settled - escaping predators, shedding parasites and gulping air have all been proposed and none of them explains all the jumping.
It eats mud. Mullet take mouthfuls of sediment and biofilm, and process them in a muscular gizzard - a grinding stomach like a bird's, complete with the sand it swallows as grit - then run the result through an unusually long intestine. Almost no other fish digests this way, and it lets the species live on material nothing else competes for.
It handles fresh water. Mullet move far up rivers and sit in brackish lagoons at salinities that would kill a reef fish, which is why they are the fish of harbors, canals and river mouths everywhere in the warm world.
They have been farmed since antiquity, the roe is salted and pressed into bottarga, and the species is one of the oldest managed food fishes in the Mediterranean basin - a plain gray fish with a very long human history.
The species. Mugil cephalus Linnaeus 1758 - kephalos. ETYFish
- torpedo-shaped silver fish with a broad flat head and a small mouth
- large scales with dark centers, forming faint stripes along the flank
- in schools at the surface, often jumping clear of the water for no visible reason
- length up to 75 cm
Why it's threatened
No information available.
Threat classification from the IUCN Red List.
