Clupeidae

Atlantic herring

Clupea harengus

Ribbons of sticky eggs settle across the seabed

• Blue
• Gray
• Silver
• Temperate
• Coastal
• Nearshore
• Globally widespread
• Marine fish
• Fusiform
• Compressed cross-section
• Medium
• Temperate fish

Forming the biological foundation of northern ocean fisheries and global commercial maritime history, the Atlantic herring is one of the most abundant and economically pivotal schooling clupeids on Earth. Its streamlined, spindle-shaped frame displays an iridescent deep blue-green back that dissolves into glistening, mirror-like silvery sides and an unkeeled belly. The operculum is completely smooth, lacking the radiating striations of pilchards, and the lower jaw projects slightly forward with tiny teeth. Circulating in vast, disciplined shoals across the boreal continental shelves of the North Atlantic from the White Sea, Iceland, and Spitsbergen to the Baltic and North Seas, and south along North America to Cape Hatteras, it occupies depths from the surface down to two hundred and fifty meters. Schools cruise pelagic currents to filter-feed on calanoid copepods, krill, and pteropods, before depositing extensive carpets of adhesive demersal eggs over offshore gravel beds. A foundational forage species for cod, whales, and seabirds, maximum length reaches forty-five centimetres.

Sources: NOAA Fisheries — Atlantic Herring, Clupea harengus