Definition
Organisms such as fishes which hatch in fresh water and migrate to higher salinities such as the sea to mature and then migrate back into fresh water to spawn.
Background
Originating in the nineteenth-century Russian literature and refined from the original term (“contranatant”; Meek, 1916; Subnikov, 1976) by Meyers (1949), anadromous is one of the three types of migration between the sea and fresh water (McDowall, 1987). The directed movement by anadromous fish between these markedly different habitats is specifically associated with reproductive phases of their life cycle. Of the approximately 20,000 species of fish around the world (Cohen, 1970), McDowall estimated that 54 % are anadromous. They are most common in northern subpolar and cooler temperate waters.
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Cohen, D. M., 1970. How many recent fish are there? Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, 38, 341–346.
McDowall, R. M., 1987. The occurrence and distribution of diadromy among fishes. In Dadswell, M. J., Klauda, R. J., Moffitt, C. M., Saunders, R. L., Rulifson, R. A., and Cooper, J. E. (eds.), Common Strategies of Anadromous and Catadromous Fishes. American Fisheries Society Symposium, Vol. 1, Bethesda, MD.
Meek, A., 1916. The Migrations of Fishes. London: Edward Arnold.
Meyers, G. S., 1949. Usage of anadromous, catadromous and allied terms for migratory fishes. Copeia, 11, 89–97.
Subnikov, D. A., 1976. Types of migrations of diadromous and semidiadromous fishes. Journal of Ichthyology, 16, 531–535.
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© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Simenstad, C.A. (2016). Anadromous. In: Kennish, M.J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Estuaries. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8801-4_55
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