What burbot fish looks like, description, distribution, growing in a pond

Burbot fish is a promising object of fish farming in specific conditions, an interesting object of amateur fishing. Burbot can be grown in pasture aquaculture, ponds, intensive aquaculture in cages, and in RAS. In this article we will look at where the burbot fish is found, how to breed burbot, as well as a lot of other useful information, read to the end - it will be interesting!

Content

• What type of fish is burbot?
• Where is the burbot fish found?
• Burbot is a river or sea fish
• How to determine the age of burbot
• Nutrition, size and growth rate of burbot
• Burbot feeding in reservoirs
• Size and growth rate of burbot
• How to breed burbot in ponds and other bodies of water
• Procurement of spawners, production and incubation of eggs
• Spawning of burbot in reservoirs
• Breeding burbot in the lake as a bioreclamation agent
• Growing burbot in a pond
• Burbot planting density when grown in ponds
• Breeding burbot in cages
• Burbot diseases

 

What type of fish is burbot?

What family of fish does this fish belong to? Burbot fish, Latin name Lota lota, is the only freshwater species of cod. Burbot family of fish. More precisely, what kind of fish does burbot belong to? We can say that it belongs to the order Cod-like fish, the burbot family, the genus burbot, the burbot species.
Burbot, a freshwater fish, comes from the marine order of codfish; long ago it moved away from the main group and moved into fresh waters. Despite the long-standing departure to fresh waters, the marine fish burbot has retained many features of the biology and physiology of burbot, remaining similar to those of its marine relatives.

Where is the burbot fish found?

Let's look in more detail at where the burbot fish lives. The burbot fish lives in freshwater bodies of Northern Europe and Siberia. The southern border of the mass habitat of burbot fish reaches the middle reaches of the Volga, Don, Dnieper, Dniester, Danube rivers; burbot is also found in the basins of the Amur, Ob, Irtysh rivers, in Lake Baikal, Teletskoye and other lakes.
Currently, the number of burbot fish in Europe is rapidly declining. There, burbot is on a par with such rare fish species as Atlantic sturgeon, European alose, salmon, brown trout, whitefish and others. Therefore, burbot fish is often found in regional red books. The reason for the decline in burbot numbers is associated, first of all, with water pollution and over-regulation of water bodies.
Where does the burbot fish live? Burbot is found in cold-water bodies of water with clear water and a sandy or rocky bottom. Burbot stays near the bottom, climbing under snags and roots near steep banks, and is active at night. Burbot is most active in the cold season. Burbot feeds and reproduces under the ice. Burbot forms schools only in winter, when burbot spawning occurs. Burbot fish requires a large amount of oxygen in the water, but feels good even when the oxygen content is reduced to 5-7 cm3/liter.
Burbot is a river or sea fish

The question often comes up: is burbot a river fish or a sea fish? As already mentioned, burbot is a freshwater species that forms sedentary populations in rivers and lakes. But the river fish burbot in some ecological regions forms semi-anadromous populations, so burbot is partly a sea fish, just like pike perch or bream in the Sea of Azov.

How to determine the age of burbot

In burbot, age is determined by the rings that are present on the gill cover.

 

 

What does burbot fish look like - characteristic external signs

What does burbot fish look like? The burbot fish is a nocturnal bottom predator. The color of the burbot's body, as a rule, along the body is dark spots diverging on the sides, olive-gray in color with all sorts of shades.
Burbot fish description. Often the body color of burbot can vary among different individuals from light to almost black. The belly and lower part of the head of the burbot are white or light gray. As noted in codfish, changes in the body color of burbot can be observed, which depends on the background. There is also a change in color in single burbot individuals depending on the color of other fish in the group.
The body of burbot is elongated, compressed towards the caudal part. The body is covered with very small scales, which are embedded in the skin. Skin with a large number of goblet mucous cells.
The head of the burbot is flattened and wide on top, with an unpaired barbel on the chin and short barbels at the front nostrils. Typical for this family, burbot has a barbel on its chin.
The mouth is large, terminal, with a large number of small bristle-like teeth on the jaws, vomer and pharyngeal platforms. Sexual dimorphism in burbot is not pronounced. The body of a burbot with two dorsal fins.

Nutrition, size and growth rate of burbot

Burbot feeding in reservoirs

Burbot is a sedentary nocturnal predator. Burbot can feed at temperatures around 0 C. Burbot feeds most actively at temperatures below 12-15 C.
Unlike other freshwater fish, burbot fish uses up its accumulated energy reserves in the summer. Therefore, in the fall, with a decrease in water temperature, burbot begins to eat intensively in order to support the increase in energy expenditure of the body, which is associated with simultaneous body growth and maturation of the gonads. Burbot actively feeds in the winter - spring period. During the period of active feeding, burbot attacks any moving object, if it is small in size. At the same time, the burbot carefully sneaks up on its prey along the bottom and makes a throw at close range. Thanks to color vision, burbot notices prey only from a distance of 10-15 cm. Burbot is very sensitive to odors, so it determines the location of food using smell, and makes precise targeting of the prey using lateral line receptors.
What does burbot fish eat? The food spectrum of burbot varies depending on the seasonal habitat. In some reservoirs, the diet of burbot is dominated by invertebrates, in other cases by fish.
In general, burbot larvae with a body length of 3.8 mm begin to consume phytoplankton. Juvenile burbot feed mainly on the larvae of dragonflies, beetles and other insects, crustaceans and leeches. Adult burbot also eat fish. In salmon rivers, it competes with salmon for food, just as grayling eats trout eggs at spawning grounds.
In the rivers adjacent to Lake Baikal, burbot prefers to feed on rock broadmouth, sand broadhead, yellow-winged broadmouth, dace, ide, roach, juvenile pike, and perch. Cases of cannibalism are not uncommon; in the Kolyma River, the burbot's diet consists mainly of its juveniles.
Winter observations of burbot on the middle and upper Ob have proven that burbot also feeds during the spawning period.
In general, burbot eats low-value fish species in large quantities, so burbot controls their numbers and is one of the links in maintaining the stability of a reservoir’s ecosystem. In certain cases, burbot plays the role of a bioreclamation agent in a reservoir, destroying weed fish, in particular, rotan firebrand. 

Size and growth rate of burbot

How big does burbot fish grow? Burbot is a fish with an average growth rate, just like eel or tench, crucian carp, and bluefish. Burbot reaches a length of 1 m and a weight of 32 kg; burbot fish of this size can be found at the mouths of Arctic rivers, but specimens of 50 cm and 2-3 kg are most often found.

 

Table - Growth of burbot in different reservoirs (length and weight of fish by age groups, cm/g)

Water	Age, years
	0+	1+	2+	3+	4+	5+	6+
Ob	-	-	31,1/250	40,1/483	45,9/710	48,1/867	54,1/1225
Irtysh	-	-	41,3/560	45,4/856	51,0/1235	58.7/1990	61,2/2250
lake Teletskoye	-	-	-	35/337	37,9/428	41,6/514	42,7/564
Kama	17,2	21,4	25,6	31,2	41,2	-	-
Pechora lake	16,9	23,9	34,2	41,9	44,8	-	-
Kilpijarvi (Finland)	21/70	26,3/137	28,0/162	31,6/275	31,7/250	38,2/453	37,7/402

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to breed burbot in ponds and other bodies of water

 

Procurement of spawners, production and incubation of eggs

 

Puberty in burbot occurs at different ages depending on the geographical location of the reservoir. The earliest breeding age for burbot is noted in water bodies of temperate climates at mid-latitudes - in the Rybinsk Reservoir, in the middle reaches of the Volga River, where burbot matures in the second year of life, but only in part of the generation. Burbot, living in the polar regions, is characterized by a later period of sexual maturation. In such reservoirs, burbot first begins to mature at the age of 5+ ... 7+. Females in such populations mature one or several years later than males. Therefore, on average, we can say that burbot reaches sexual maturity at the 3-4th year of life.

Spawning of burbot in reservoirs

Burbot reaches sexual maturity at the age of 4 years. Burbot fish is a pelagophile.
To spawn, burbot migrates to spawning grounds. The average rate of local migrations is up to 2 km per day. The length of the spawning migration of burbot can be from 6 to 1000 kilometers. An adaptive property for better survival of offspring in burbot is high fertility. Burbot spawns from December to February in portions, the fertility of burbot is from 30 thousand in a 4-year-old female to 5 million eggs in a 10-year-old female. The relative fertility of spawning is 300-750 thousand pieces/kg body weight. It spawns eggs into the water column, where it develops under favorable conditions for respiration. Burbot spawns on pebble-sand shallows: when spawning in a river - on riffles, when burbot spawns in lakes - at a depth of 2-3 m. Burbot eggs are bottom, weakly sticky, washed off with water, and at a flow speed of 4-8 cm/s they float carried away by the current and gradually sinks to the bottom, where it can subsequently be transported by the current over relatively long distances. The incubation period of burbot eggs is from 1.5 to 2.5 months. (100-160 degree days at 3.5°C).
The diameter of burbot eggs is 0.9-1.1 mm. The weight of one ripe egg is approximately 0.25 mg.
By June, burbot fry in the river reach a length of 4-6 cm. In ponds, the main food of burbot in the first 3 days is phytoplankton; juveniles measuring 15 mm actively eat zooplankton organisms.

Artificial breeding of burbot

During artificial propagation, the first work on obtaining caviar is carried out directly at the spawning sites. Having caught the burbot from the ice hole, they fertilize the strained eggs, place them in boxes with mesh strains and lower them under the ice. Burbot eggs can be incubated in Weiss and Zunger apparatuses.
Due to the high fertility of burbot, it is possible to obtain many burbot larvae during incubation. The larvae can be used to stock water bodies - reservoirs, lakes, ponds, quarries - with fish. At the stage of endogenous feeding, early juveniles of burbot are transferred to a reservoir, mainly without rearing.
Collecting caviar in reservoirs They take place at the end of December - the first half of January. Incubation of burbot eggs is carried out in Weiss apparatus at a flow rate of 3-4 liters per minute. Experiments show that caviar waste is 20%. Embryos are fully formed in the eggs by April at a water temperature of 0.4-0.8 C. Hatching of the larvae takes place at a temperature of 0-0.2 C. Some researchers indicate that for normal development and hatching of embryos, the water must be heated to 1.5 - 3 S.
When hatching, the larvae are 3.5-4.5 mm long and have a body weight of 0.15 to 0.45 mg.
In the case of feeding in high-food reservoirs, the growth rate of burbot is very high, by autumn they reach 150-200 grams, and at the age of one year - 300-400 grams. If water bodies are less supplied with food, the growth rate of burbot is lower.

Breeding burbot in the lake as a bioreclamation agent

Burbot can be used as a bioreclamation agent for water bodies, if the task is to clear it of low-value fish or such invaders as sleeper firebrand. The sleeper head actively reproduces in new reservoirs and reaches large numbers and biomass, while in the absence of predatory fish it is capable of completely destroying other fish species by eating their young. It is difficult to get rid of the rotan firebrand using traditional bioreclamation agents, such as pike or pike perch, since they cannot colonize the dense thickets of macrophytes where the rotan prefers to live. While burbot and rotan have similar biotopes. Burbot fingerlings prefer to stay in areas of the reservoir that are rich in food, warm well and have little flow. A fully formed burbot fry tends to sink to the bottom or hide behind cover. Juvenile burbot at the age of 2 months actively feeds on the juveniles of other fish and grows rapidly.
If you use burbot as a bioreclamation agent, then it is stocked into reservoirs with rotan when the burbot has reached a length of at least 3-8 cm, otherwise the burbot itself will become food for rotan. The density of planting of burbot in reservoirs as a rotan bioreclamation agent is low - 30-50 specimens per 1 hectare. Under these conditions, burbot has a high growth rate.
Is burbot fish tasty? Burbot liver is a delicacy, and burbot meat is of very high quality. The liver is fatty and large, for 1 kg of fish weight the liver takes up 150-200 grams, subsequently the ratio changes, but the liver still remains large.

Growing burbot in a pond

First, let’s look at whether burbot will live in a pond. No matter how strange it may be, in the Urals back in 1856, the “doctor of the Demidovs” Pyotr Malyshev conducted a number of successful experiments in the artificial breeding of burbot, for which he was awarded a gold medal from the Moscow Society of Agriculture.
Breeding burbot in a pond - in modern conditions, when burbot is introduced into the reservoirs of the Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk regions, burbot survives very well in the pond, but has not reproduced anywhere. In the reservoirs of the Urals, burbot can be grown in annual and perennial rotations, except in reservoirs with oxygen deficiency and high water mineralization.
Where are burbot bred? Burbot cod fish, due to its “sedentary nature”, inhabiting the floodplains of rivers, is a promising and desirable object for pasture fish farming in cold-water reservoirs.
Where can burbot be bred in the lake? Cultivation of burbot can be effective in regions located north of Zone I of pond fish farming, as well as in foothill and mountain reservoirs where low-value fish are found in abundance.

Burbot planting density when grown in ponds

The optimal density for planting burbot in ponds is 1000 pcs/ha for fingerlings and 150-200 pcs/ha for two-year-olds.
Growth rate of burbot in ponds: fingerlings - 22 g, yearlings - 70g, two-year-olds - 240 g, two-year-olds - 350-370 g.

Breeding burbot in cages

Growing burbot in cages under natural thermal conditions is promising. Burbot is a cold-loving fish, just like taimen or whitefish, rainbow trout; when the water warms up, it sharply reduces its activity and becomes lethargic.

Breeding burbot in RAS

Breeding burbot in RAS has a number of positive features, such as:

• Breeding burbot in a RAS requires cold water, which eliminates the cost of heating water
• Burbot tolerates replanting and transportation well, with minimal waste
• The market niche for fresh burbot fish, as well as dishes made from it, including burbot liver, has not yet been filled.
• The growth rate of burbot in a recirculation system under optimal conditions can be high and not inferior to the growth rate of burbot in high-food reservoirs.

Burbot diseases

Burbot can suffer from diseases such as Trienophorosis, Octomitosis, Diplostomosis, Neoquinorhynchosis, Pomphorhynchosis, Echinorhynchosis, Diphyllobothriasis, Lerneosis.