The greenback horse mackerel or greenback scad, Trachurus declivis, is a species of jack in the family Carangidae, found around western and southern Australia, and around New Zealand, from the surface to depths of 460 m. Its length is up to 64 cm.
Its common name derives from the legend that other smaller species of fish could ride on its back over great distances. It is an important commercial fish.
Famous quotes containing the words horse and/or mackerel:
“To long for that which comes not. To lie a-bed and sleep not. To serve well and please not. To have a horse that goes not. To have a man obeys not. To lie in jail and hope not. To be sick and recover not. To lose one’s way and know not. To wait at door and enter not, and to have a friend we trust not: are ten such spites as hell hath not.”
—John Florio (c. 1553–1625)
“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)