Haddock
The haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus) is a saltwater ray-finned fish from the family Gadidae, the true cods. It is the only species in the monotypic genus Melanogrammus. It is found in the North Atlantic Ocean and associated seas, where it is an important species for fisheries, especially in northern Europe, where it is marketed fresh, frozen and smoked; smoked varieties include the Finnan haddie and the Arbroath smokie. Other smoked version include long boneless, the fileted side of larger haddock smoked in oak chips with the skin left on the fillet.
This article is about a fish. For other uses, see Haddock (disambiguation).Distribution[edit]
The haddock has populations on either side of the north Atlantic but it is more abundant in the eastern Atlantic than it is on the North American side. In the north-east Atlantic it occurs from the Bay of Biscay north to Spitzbergen; however, it is most abundant north of the English Channel. It also occurs around Novaya Zemlya and the Barents Sea in the Arctic.[6] The largest stocks are in the North Sea, off the Faroe Islands, off Iceland and the coast of Norway but these are discrete populations with little interchange between them. Off North America, the haddock is found from western Greenland south to Cape Hatteras, but the main commercially fished stock occurs from Cape Cod and the Grand Banks.[9]
Parasites[edit]
Cod and related species are plagued by parasites. For example, the cod worm, Lernaeocera branchialis, starts life as a copepod, a small, free-swimming crustacean larva. The first host used by cod worm is a flatfish or lumpsucker, which they capture with grasping hooks at the front of their bodies. They penetrate the lumpsucker with a thin filament which they use to suck its blood. The nourished cod worms then mate on the lumpsucker.[13][14]
The female worm, with her now fertilized eggs, then finds a cod, or a cod-like fish such as a haddock or whiting. There, the worm clings to the gills while it metamorphoses into a plump, sinusoidal, wormlike body, with a coiled mass of egg strings at the rear. The front part of the worm's body penetrates the body of the cod until it enters the rear bulb of the host's heart. There, firmly rooted in the cod's circulatory system, the front part of the parasite develops like the branches of a tree, reaching into the main artery. In this way, the worm extracts nutrients from the cod's blood, remaining safely tucked beneath the cod's gill cover until it releases a new generation of offspring into the water.[10][13][14]
Taxonomy and etymology[edit]
The haddock was first formally described as Gadus aeglefinus in 1758 by Carolus Linnaeus in the 10th edition of volume one of his Systema naturae with a type locality given as "European seas".[15] In 1862 Theodore Nicholas Gill created the genus Melanogrammus with M. aeglefinus as its only species.[16] The generic name Melanogrammus means "black line", a reference to the black lateral line of this species. The specific name is a latinisation of the vernacular names “Egrefin” and “Eglefin”, used in France and England.[17]
Nutritional value per 100 g (3.5 oz)
469 kJ (112 kcal)
0.0 g
Quantity
Quantity
