Alan Davidson

Wolf-Fish, Catfish

Anarhichas lupus Linnaeus

Appears in
top 1000North Atlantic Seafood
North Atlantic Seafood

By Alan Davidson

Published 1980

  • About

Family Anarhichadidae

  • French: Loup marin
  • Dutch: Zeewolf
  • German: Katfisch, Seewolf
  • Polish: Zebacz smugowy
  • Russian: Zubatka
  • Finnish: Merikissa
  • Swedish: Havskatt
  • Norwegian: Gråsteinbit
  • Danish: Havkat
  • Icelandic: Steinbítur

REMARKS An adult wolf-fish may measure well over 1 metre; and the spotted wolf-fish (Anarhichas minor Olafsen) is even larger. The colour is dark, blue-grey or greenish.

The wolf-fish ranges down from Greenland and Spitzbergen as far as Cape Cod to the west and France to the east. Its lupine characteristics greatly impressed Goode. ‘It is impossible to imagine a more voracious-looking animal,’ he wrote, describing its ‘great pavements of teeth’, those in front pointed like those of a tiger and those behind adapted for crushing. Since the wolf-fish gobbles spiny sea urchins and crabs and clams, among other foods, it needs this formidable apparatus, to which the Icelandic name, meaning stone-biter, pays tribute.