Animal · Spain, United States, Japan
Swordfish
Xiphias gladius — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The swordfish is a large ocean hunter with a long flat bill like a sword, which it swings sideways through shoals of squid and fish. It is one of the fastest swimmers in the sea and can warm its own eyes to see in cold, dark water.
Picture credit: Pearson Scott Foresman (Public domain) · NOAA Deep Sea Coral Research & Technology Program-Pelagic Research Services. (Public domain) · Raver Duane, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Public domain) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the swordfish live?
Home: Warm and temperate open oceans around the world.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Spain, the United States, Japan, Portugal, Morocco, Brazil, Chile, Italy.
Conservation status from the IUCN: close to being at risk.
The short profile
Fully grown: usually about 3 m long, up to 4.5 m. It weighs about 150 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
A swordfish usually measures about three metres, and the very biggest weigh more than a horse. The sword is really its upper jaw, grown long and flat with sharp edges, and the fish swings it sideways to stun squid and mackerel rather than to spear them. Behind its eyes sits a special block of muscle tissue that works like a heater, keeping eyes and brain much warmer than the sea around them, so the fish can hunt hundreds of metres down in the cold and the dark. Grown swordfish have no scales and no teeth at all. Many are caught for food every year, and the species is now listed as near threatened, so countries limit how many boats may take.
Find it on the globe
Swordfish 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.
Questions children ask
What is the swordfish's sword for?
For hunting, but not as a spear. The swordfish swims into a shoal and swings its flat bill from side to side, hitting squid and fish so hard that they are stunned and easy to swallow.
How fast can a swordfish swim?
Nobody has measured it exactly. The figure of 100 km/h that often appears in books is not backed by real measurements; careful studies of similar fish suggest something closer to 36 km/h, which is still very fast for a large animal.
Do swordfish have teeth?
Young swordfish do, but adults lose them completely, and they lose their scales as well. A grown swordfish swallows its prey whole, which is why it stuns the prey with its bill first.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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