Every year, scientists studying living beings make amazing discoveries. Representatives of each species of underwater inhabitants live a different amount of time, which varies from several days to tens of years. But can a person independently determine how many years a particular fish has lived?

Determination of age by scales

Most fish are covered in scales. This is the outer cover of the body, consisting of bone or horn plates. Flakes form, grow and change over the course of the life of their wearer and perform a protective function.

Interesting fact: in the fishing industry, scales are considered waste material, but some of it is spent on the production of fish meal. The resulting powder is used as one of the components in the manufacture of animal feed.

And if a fish is a means of protection for fish, then for a person it presents a real information card, from which you can find out a lot of interesting things about a particular creature, including age.

The principle of determining the age of fish by scales is quite simple and completely coincides with the methodology for identifying this parameter by the trunk of trees. Every year, concentric formations form on the scales, diverging in circles from center to edge. By counting their number, you can determine how old the fish is caught.

However, in most cases it will be necessary to put the flakes under the microscope in order to examine in detail the available circles.

Other methods for determining age

There are fish whose scales are not suitable for determining age. Then scientists go to the trick and look for other ways to help find out how many years the fish lived. This helps the study of other parts of the body, with each species considering a certain element:

• in zander and perch, age is determined by the gill cover;
• in burbot, ruff and smelt on the vertebrae;
• at the sterlet and sturgeon along the cut of the first ray of the pectoral fin.

These elements are dried, clarified and processed. After that, rings characterizing the age of the fish can be distinguished on their surface.

The age of the fish is determined by the annual rings located on their scales. If the latter cannot be used for study, the number of years an individual has lived can be calculated from the same rings on the vertebra, gill cover, or saw cut of the pectoral fin beam.