Eulachon

Candles fish ( Thaleichthys pacificus )

The candle fish or Eulachon ( Thaleichthys pacificus ) is a simple count of the family of smelt fish that occurs from the St. Matthew Island and the Kuskokwim Bay in the Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands to Monterey Bay in California in the eastern North Pacific.

Features

The candle fish reaches a length of up to 30 centimeters. The skin is silvery with a bluish- brown back. Sablefish feed on plankton. For spawning, they migrate up to 160 kilometers upstream into fresh water.

Use

The candle fish is a good food fish and served because of its high fat content of about 15 weight percent of the Indians also to the fish oil. For this purpose, the raw fish were fermented in a pit and then boiled in water, so that the fat rise and could be skimmed off. Whole, dried sablefish were burned clamped between pieces of wood or covered with a wick as a light source.