Three true perches, and a crowd of lookalikes
Plenty of fish get called perch, but a true perch belongs to the freshwater genus Perca, which most experts divide into just three species: the European, Balkhash and yellow perches. Their fossil history reaches back to the Middle Miocene of what is now Ukraine.
The name reaches back to the Greek perke, the word for the European perch, which is the genus’s type species. That fish is greenish with dark vertical bands and red or orange fin tips; mostly European, it has also been introduced to Australia and New Zealand, where anglers call it redfin or English perch. The Balkhash perch of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and China has a dark grey back over silvery or greenish flanks, and was moved into the Nuru and Chu river basins in the late twentieth century. North America’s yellow perch looks nearly identical to the European species but is smaller and paler, usually topping out around 38 centimetres and a kilogram, and is widely hatchery-raised for the table.
All three have long, rounded bodies suited to speed, rough ctenoid scales, paired chest and pelvic fins, and two dorsal fins, the front one spiny and the rear soft. Small brush-like teeth line the jaws and the roof of the mouth. Males can be told from females by the urogenital opening, round and larger in males but V- or U-shaped in females.
Perch are predators of smaller fish, shellfish, zooplankton and insect larvae, favouring water with plenty of weeds and debris, and they hide their spawn among plants in spring. The red drum, a saltwater fish from another order, is often sold as red perch, yet only members of the family Percidae qualify as the real thing.
Anglers prize them for their fight and flavour, using floats, lures, ledgers or flies. A typical catch weighs around 450 grams, anything above 40 centimetres counts as a prize, and national records run from 2.81 kilograms in Britain to 3.15 kilograms in Sweden, set in 1985.
Source: Perch
