Author: Olafsen, 1772
Anarhichas minor Olafsen, 1772
Status in World Register of Marine Species:
Accepted name: Anarhichas minor Olafsen, 1772 (updated 2009-06-25)
Diagnosis. body elongate, depth more than four times in SL. Head large, snout blunt; jaw teeth strong, canine-like teeth in front, conical and rounded teeth behind; teeth on vomer large, rather pointed, reaching back as far as the line of palatine teeth on either side of them. Caudal fin with 20-23 finrays. Colour: body yellowish- or greyish-brown to dark brown, with numerous distinct spots extending also onto dorsal fin; wide black bars in juveniles to about 10 cm. Size: to 144 cm TL, usually to about 120 cm.
Habitat: offshore waters over soft bottoms, often with boulders, at 25-590 m, but most common at 100-400 m. Food: mainly echinoderms, but also crustaceans, molluscs and fishes. Reproduction: eggs deposited in spherical lumps at about 110-250 m in April-December, mainly June-August, the larvae pelagic in June (at 2.4 cm), becoming bottomliving at 4-7 cm TL.
Distribution. Spitsbergen southward to Scandinavian coasts (to about Bergen), also Iceland and south-eastern coasts of Greenland. Elsewhere, western coasts of Greenland, Baffin I. south to Nova Scotia Banks, occasionally to Massachusetts Bay.
Eggs, larvae and young stages. Barsukov, 1959, fig. 42 (2)| Baranenkova et al., 1960.
Otoliths (sagitta). Nijssen, 1964: 180 182, fig. 2 | Schmidt, 1968: 47, pl. 9, fig. 126.