Horse mackerel is a vague vernacular term for a range of species of fish throughout the English-speaking world. It is commonly applied to pelagic fishes, especially of the Carangidae (jack mackerels and scads) family, most commonly those of the genera Trachurus or Caranx. Species known as "horse mackerel" in one English dialect or another include:
- Sarda australis, Australian bonito (Australia)
- Trachurus declivis, Greenback horse mackerel (Australia)
- Alectis indicus, Indian threadfish (Malaysia)
- Caranx hippos, Crevalle jack (Guyana, India)
- Megalaspis cordyla, torpedo scad (India)
- Selar crumenophthalmus, bigeye (India)
- Trachurus trachurus, Atlantic horse mackerel (United Kingdom, Ireland)
- Caranx crysos, blue runner (Guadaloupe, Martinique)
- Trachurus novaezelandiae, yellowtail horse mackerel (New Zealand)
- Trachurus capensis, cape horse mackerel (South Africa)
- various Scombridae, tuna
- various saurel of the Pacific coast of the Americas
- Naucrates ductor, pilot fish
Famous quotes containing the words horse and/or mackerel:
“We read that the traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had. But presently the traveller’s horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, “I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom.” “So it has,” answered the latter, “but you have not got half way to it yet.” So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but he is an old boy that knows it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)