Bony fish · Perciformes · Nototheniidae

Yellowbelly Rockcod

Notothenia coriiceps

Not Evaluated

It has not yet been assessed against the IUCN criteria. See full glossary

An Antarctic rockcod, robust and olive-brown with darker blotches, very abundant in the waters of the Antarctic Peninsula. It lives among rocks and kelp beds and eats krill, amphipods, algae and small fish. It survives all year round in water close to freezing point.

Size

30 cm – 62 cm

Diet

Carnivore

Feeds mainly on other animals.

Social structure

Solitary

Lives and hunts alone, joining others only to breed.

Sighting difficulty

Unknown

OceanCarnivore Solitary Fish Ocean

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Fun facts

Its blood and tissues contain antifreeze glycoproteins that bind to microscopic ice crystals and stop them growing, a mechanism without which the fish would freeze from the inside.
It has no swim bladder and makes up for the lack of buoyancy by storing lipids and reducing the mineralisation of its skeleton.
It is one of the keystone species of the Antarctic coastal food web and regular prey for seals, shags and penguins.
Its antifreeze glycoproteins evolved from a trypsinogen gene, a digestive enzyme: a much-cited case of how a gene changes function completely.
Those proteins do not lower the freezing point the way car antifreeze would: they bind to ice microcrystals and stop them from growing.
It is a red-blooded fish, which is why it is constantly used as the point of comparison against the icefishes: almost everything we know about their loss of haemoglobin has been measured against this species.
The notothenioids make up around 90% of the fish fauna of the Antarctic continental shelf, a dominance with almost no equivalent in other seas.