Northern pike

Where does the northern pike live?

Home: Weedy lakes and slow rivers across Europe, northern Asia and North America.

In the wild it lives in these countries: Sweden, Finland, Russia, Germany, Poland, Canada, the United States.

Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.

The short profile

Fully grown: usually 40–55 cm long, up to about 1.5 m. It weighs about 3 kilograms. On the menu: meat.

The story behind it

A pike spends much of its day doing almost nothing. It hangs among reeds and water weed, its green and cream markings breaking up its outline until it looks like another stem. When a roach or a perch swims past, the pike bends its body into an S and straightens it like a released spring, covering the last half metre in a blink. Its mouth is wide and flat like a duck's bill, and inside are rows of small teeth that all point backwards, so a struggling fish only slides deeper in. Pike swallow their catch head first, then rest for hours while it digests. In spring they move into flooded grass and shallow bays to lay their eggs, sometimes tens of thousands of them, which stick to the plants. The young hatch after about two weeks and start on tiny water fleas before they begin hunting fish of their own. Big pike are almost always female, and the males stay smaller.

Find it on the globe

Northern pike is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.