Anchovy

The anchovies are a family (Engraulidae) of small but common schooling saltwater plankton-feeding fish. They are found in scattered areas throughout the world's oceans, but are concentrated in temperate waters, and are rare or absent in very cold or very warm seas.

Biology

The anchovy is a small green fish with blue reflections dorsal to a silver longitudinal stripe that runs from the base of the caudal fin. It is a maximum nine inches in length and body shape is variable with more slender fish in northern populations. The snout is blunt with small, sharp teeth in both jaws. The mouth is larger than those of herrings and silversides, two fish which they closely resemble. It eats plankton and fish larvae.

It is generally very accepting of a wide range of temperatures and salinity. Large schools can be found in shallow, brackish areas with muddy bottoms, as in estuaries and bays.

Spawning occurs between October and March, but not in water colder than 12 °C. The anchovy appears to spawn 100 kilometers from the shore, near the surface of the water.

As a food source

The anchovy is a good food source for almost every predatory fish in its environment, including the California halibut, rock fish, yellowtail, sharks, chinook, and coho salmon. It is also extremely important to marine mammals and birds; for example, California brown pelicans and elegant terns, whose breeding success is strongly connected to anchovy abundance.

They are also eaten by some humans. Anchovies preserved by gutting and salting in brine, matured, then packed in oil, are an important food fish, both popular and unpopular for their strong flavor. In Roman times, they were the base for the fermented fish sauce called garum that was a staple of cuisine and an item of long-distance commerce produced in industrial quantities. Today they are a key ingredient in Caesar salad and Spaghetti alla Puttanesca, and are occasionally used as a pizza topping. Because of the strong flavor they are also an ingredient in several sauces, including Worcestershire sauce and many fish sauces, and in some versions of Café de Paris butter. The are most commonly marketed in small tins, either as "flat" fillets, or as "rolled anchovies" where each fillet is rolled around a caper. While both are quite salty, the flat fillets tend to be more so. They are also marketed in jars and tubes as a paste, mostly for use in making sauces. Fishermen also use anchovies as bait for larger fish such as tuna and sea bass.

The strong taste that people associate with anchovies is due to the curing process. Fresh anchovies, known in Italy as alici, have a much softer and gentler flavor. In English-speaking countries, alici are sometimes called "white anchovies", and are often served in a weak vinegar marinade.

The European anchovy, Engraulis encrasicolus, is the anchovy of commerce. Morocco now leads the world in canned anchovies. The anchovy industry along the coast of Cantabria now dwarfs the traditional Catalan salters, though the industry was only initiated in Cantabria by Sicilian salters in the mid 19th century.

Setipinna taty or ikan bilis is the anchovy commonly used in South-East Asian cooking to make fish stock or sambals. Anchovy is also used to produce budu, by fermentation process.

Fishing

Overfishing of anchovies has been a problem. Since the 1980s, large mechanized anchovy fishing vessels based in France have caught the fish in fine-mesh dragnets.

Trivia

In the animated TV series Futurama, anchovies have become extinct through a combination of overfishing and predation by the Decapodians (such as Doctor Zoidberg).
As bait the Anchovy is used to catch many fish by Anglers. See Californa Halibut
In Spongebob Squarepants, anchovies are portrayed as psychopathic bottom-feeders who speak in a language comprised entirely of the word "meep".
In Buffy the vampire slayer, Dawn Summers sings a song "Anchovies, anchovies, they're so delicious // I love them better than all the other fishes". This was apparently put into the series in response to a major pizza chain dropping the ingredient from their pizzas.

References

Anchovies | Edible fish | Fish of the Atlantic | Fish of the Pacific | Fish of the Indian ocean

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Biology

As a food source

Fishing

Trivia

See also

References