Squalius cephalus
species of fish
Squalius cephalus, the common chub, European chub or simply chub, is a species of freshwater ray-finned fish belonging to the family Leuciscidae, the daces, Eurasian minnows and related fishes. This species is found in Europe where it frequents both slow and moderate rivers, as well as canals, lakes and still waterbodies of various kinds.
Description
It is a stocky fish with a large rounded head. Its body is long and cylindrical in shape and is covered in large greenish-brown scales which are edged with narrow bands of black across the back, paling to golden on the flanks and even paler on the belly. The tail is dark brown or black, the dorsal fin is a greyish-green in colour and all the other fins are orange-red. The dorsal fin has 3 spines and 7–9 soft rays while the anal fin has 3 spines and 7–10 rays. The vertebrae count is 42–48. It can grow to 60 cm standard length but most fish are around 30 cm.
Eggs are round with a 1.8 mm diameter, and first day larvae are 6–7 mm long and weigh about 120 mg.
Distribution
The chub is distributed throughout most of northern Eurasia, it can be found in the rivers flowing into the North, Baltic, northern Black, White, Barents and Caspian Sea basins, the Atlantic basins south to Adour drainage in France and in Great Britain north to 56°, in Scandinavia in southern Finland and southern Sweden north to around Stockholm.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Squalius cephalus” as species of fish. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the science & nature register because the source frames it as species of fish. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q26821893. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Squalius cephalus” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.