The Atlantic horse mackerel, Trachurus trachurus is a species of mackerel in the family Carangidae. It gets its common name from the legend that other smaller species of fish could ride on the back of it over great distances. Other common names include common scad, maasbanker, scad, saurel, rough scad.
The Atlantic horse mackerel can be found in the north-eastern Atlantic from Iceland to Senegal, including the Cape Verde islands, and also in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
It congregates in large schools in coastal waters, where it feeds on crustaceans, squid, and other fishes. There are two main populations: the west stock which spawn in the eastern Atlantic off the coasts of western Europe, and the north stock which spawn in the North Sea.
This mackerel is edible and can be smoked, fried, salted and baked etc. It is an important commercial fish.
Read more about Atlantic Horse Mackerel: Ecology and Distribution
Famous quotes containing the words atlantic, horse and/or mackerel:
“Obscurest night involv’d the sky,
Th’ Atlantic billows roar’d,
When such a destin’d wretch as I,
Wash’d headlong from on board,
Of friends, of hope, of all bereft,
His floating home for ever left.”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)
“God help the horse, and the driver too!
And the people and beasts who have never a friend!
For the driver easily might have been you,
And the horse be me by a different end!
And nobody knows how their days will cease!
And the poor, when they’re old, have little of peace!”
—James Kenneth Stephens (1882–1950)
“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)