Golden shiner facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Golden shiner |
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Notemigonus
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crysoleucas
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The golden shiner (Notemigonus crysoleucas) is a type of fish that belongs to the minnow family. It naturally lives in eastern North America. This fish is the only species in its group, called a genus. People often use golden shiners as bait fish for catching other fish. It is probably the most commonly raised fish in ponds across the United States. You can also find it in Quebec, where its French names are "Mené jaune" or "Chatte de l'Est".
Contents
About the Golden Shiner
The golden shiner is the only fish from North America in a group of fish called Leuciscinae. Most other fish in this group are found in Eurasia.
What Does a Golden Shiner Look Like?
Golden shiners can grow up to 30 cm (12 in) long. However, in the wild, they are usually between 7.5 and 12.5 cm (3.0 and 4.9 in) long. Their bodies are flat from side to side, which means they are "deep-bodied."
Their back is dark green or olive, and their belly is silvery white. Younger fish have silver sides, but older, larger ones have golden sides. Sometimes, you might see a faint dark stripe along their sides.
The fin on their underside, called the anal fin, is large and has 8 to 19 rays. The fin on their back, called the dorsal fin, almost always has 8 rays. Their scales are quite large and can fall off easily if you handle the fish. They have a small mouth that points upwards.
You can tell a golden shiner apart from other minnows by two special features:
- Its lateral line (a line of sensory pores along its side) curves downwards. The lowest point of this curve is just above its pelvic fins.
- It has a fleshy ridge, called a keel, on its belly. This keel is between its pelvic fins and the start of its anal fin, and it has no scales.
The lack of scales on this keel is important. It helps tell the golden shiner apart from a similar European fish called the common rudd (Scardinius erythrophtalmus). The rudd also has a keel, but its keel has scales. Golden shiners and rudds can even have babies together, and these mixed babies might have a few scales on their keel.
Where Do Golden Shiners Live?
Golden shiners are found all over the eastern half of North America. Their natural range goes north to the St. Lawrence River, the Great Lakes, and Lake Winnipeg. It stretches west to the Dakotas and Texas.
Because people use them as bait, golden shiners have been moved to many places outside of their natural home.
Golden Shiner Habitat
Golden shiners prefer calm waters. This means you can find them in:
- Lakes
- Ponds
- Sloughs (swampy areas)
- Ditches
Sometimes, they live in the quietest parts of rivers. They especially like areas with lots of plants and weeds.
These fish are quite tough. They can handle some pollution, cloudy water, and even low levels of oxygen. They can also live in very warm water, up to 40 °C (104 °F), which is unusually hot for a North American minnow.
What Do Golden Shiners Eat?
Golden shiners are omnivores, meaning they eat both plants and animals. They are also crepuscular planktivores. This means they mostly eat tiny organisms called plankton, and they are most active at dawn and dusk.
Their diet includes:
- Zooplankton (tiny animals)
- Phytoplankton (tiny plants)
- Microcrustaceans (very small shellfish)
- Insects
- Larger plants
- Algae
They can find food at the water's surface, in the middle of the water, or at the bottom. They can see their prey to catch it, or they can filter-feed if there's a lot of plankton around, even without seeing it.
Golden shiners themselves are food for many larger fish, like trout and bass. This is why they are so popular as bait fish.
Golden Shiner Reproduction
In warmer southern areas, golden shiners can start having babies when they are one year old. In colder places like Canada, they usually start breeding when they are three years old.
Female golden shiners lay up to 200,000 sticky eggs. They usually lay these eggs among water plants. The parents do not take care of their eggs or young.
Sometimes, golden shiners will lay their eggs in the nests of other fish, like pumpkinseeds, largemouth bass, or bowfin. These other fish can sometimes eat shiners. This behavior is called "egg dumping." It's a bit like how cuckoo birds lay their eggs in other birds' nests.
When shiners dump their eggs, their eggs get to benefit from the other fish's parental care. Unlike cuckoos, the host fish's own eggs usually don't get harmed by the shiner eggs. In fact, having more eggs might even help protect the host's eggs from predators, as there are more targets for the predator to choose from.
Golden Shiner Behavior
Golden shiners live in large groups called shoals. These shoals move around a lot. Studies have shown that a small number of fish at the front of a shoal can guide the whole group. For example, if one fish knows where and when food will appear, it can lead many other fish to that spot at the right time. Even if all fish know where the food is, some fish tend to stay at the front. This might be because they are hungrier or more motivated to find food. Smaller fish are also often found at the front of a shoal, possibly because they are more eager to find food.
Like other minnows, golden shiners can sense a special alarm chemical called schreckstoff. This chemical is found in special cells in their skin. If a predator catches and bites a minnow, the skin breaks, and the chemical is released. Other minnows nearby can smell this chemical and quickly swim away from the danger.
This alarm chemical can also stay active in a predator's poop. So, minnows can tell if a fish-eating predator is nearby just by sensing its waste. In lab tests, golden shiners reacted strongly to water that had poop from snakes that had eaten other golden shiners. But they didn't react much to water with poop from snakes that had eaten other types of fish that don't have this alarm chemical.
Golden shiners also have a good sense of time. They can learn to expect food at certain times of the day or night. They can even do this if there are several mealtimes a day. When they expect food, they start swimming towards the food source. Other fish that don't know about the food can see this and join the anticipating fish, hoping to share the meal.
These fish are also good at time-place learning. This means they can learn to connect different places with different times of day. For example, they can be taught to eat in one part of an aquarium in the morning and a different part in the afternoon. They can even learn to eat in one spot in the morning, another at midday, and then go back to the first spot in the afternoon.
Images for kids
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An 1837 watercolor painting of a golden shiner by Jacques Burkhardt.
See also
In Spanish: Carpita dorada o sardinilla de quilla para niños
