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Orange roughy — printable fact sheet
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Orange roughy
Hoplostethus atlanticus
Hoplostethus atlanticus is a cautionary tale about fishing an animal you do not understand. Marketed from the late 1970s as a mild white fish — it was renamed from "slimehead," which was accurate but unsellable — it was trawled off New Zealand and Australia in enormous volumes b…
Did you know?
- Orange roughy do not begin to reproduce until they are 20-30 years old, making population recovery from overfishing extremely slow.
- The oldest orange roughy reliably aged was around 149 years, meaning a fillet served today may come from a fish that hatched before the First World War. Because its flesh is loaded with indigestible wax esters rather than triglycerides, eating large quantities can cause a purgative effect similar to escolar. Its old name, slimehead, refers to the family Trachichthyidae's network of mucus canals on the skull, a pressure-sensing system for lightless water.
What I learned
Draw the orange roughy
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