Barracudas are twenty-six species of living spears
Barracudas are long, fang-toothed ocean predators, the only genus in their family, named Sphyraenidae by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1815. They look so much like freshwater pike that people often compare the two, yet they are unrelated. The name reached English through Spanish, possibly from a Cariban word.
Barracudas patrol tropical and subtropical seas worldwide, from the eastern Atlantic and the Red Sea to the Caribbean and the tropical Pacific, keeping close to the surface around reefs and seagrass beds. Sport anglers prize them. Most live in open salt water, although the great barracuda also enters brackish estuaries.
The body is a slender torpedo topped by a big pointed head, often with a jutting lower jaw. Sharp, uneven, fang-like teeth sit in sockets along the jaws. The two dorsal fins are set far apart: the front one carries five spines and folds away into a groove, while the rear one, with a single spine and nine soft rays, mirrors the anal fin below it. That split fin is the easiest way to tell a barracuda from a pike. A straight lateral line runs nose to tail, the forked tail sits on a sturdy stalk, and a large swim bladder lets the fish hover or cruise while spending little energy.
Typical colouring is grey, green, white or blue above, silver on the flanks and chalky white below, sometimes with dark blotches or bars and yellowish fins. The largest species reach about 165 centimetres, including the European barracuda of the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic.
Taxonomists currently count 26 species with names such as sawtooth, pickhandle, pelican and blackfin barracuda. Ranges vary widely: the Pacific barracuda runs from Puget Sound to Cabo San Lucas, the southern sennet from North Carolina to Brazil and Bermuda. New species are still being named, one as recently as 2020, and fossil forms were described from 1882 onward.
Source: Barracuda
