Isopsetta isolepis
Butter Sole
NS
G5
Collection Details
Specimens
Photos
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Records
Taxonomic Hierarchy
Actinopterygii (Ray-finned Fishes)
Pleuronectfiormes (Flatfishes)
Pleuronectidae (Righteye Flounders)
Isopsetta
Isopsetta isolepis (Butter Sole)
Description
This species account was compiled from
FishBase (Froese, R. and D. Pauly. Editors. 2025. FishBase. World Wide Web electronic publication. www.fishbase.org, version 04/2025.)
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Characters
Body shape: short and / or deep. Dorsal origin above eye. Caudal rounded. Pectoral small, bluntly pointed.
Distribution
Eastern Pacific: Bristol Bay in the southeastern Bering Sea and Amchitka Island (Aleutian Islands) to Ventura, California, USA.
Habitat Associations
Marine. demersal. depth range 20-425 m.
Biology
Common in shallow water on soft, silty bottom. Moves into shallow water in summer and to deeper water in winter (Ref. 6885). Spawning adults exhibit north-south migrations (Ref. 6885). Feeds on chaetopod marine worms, young herring, shrimps, and sand dollars (Ref. 6885). A tasty food fish, sometimes marketed (Ref. 2850). Also used for mink food (Ref. 2850).
Max length: 55.0 cm TL; max age: 11 years.
Reproductive mode: dioecism; fertilization: external; nonguarders (open water/substratum egg scatterers); parental care: none.
IUCN Red List Status: Least Concern (LC), assessed 2020-08-13. Resilience: Low (K=0.26; tmax=11; tm=2).
Commercial or Environmental Importance
Fisheries: minor commercial; gamefish.
References
Breder, C.M. and D.E. Rosen (1966) Modes of reproduction in fishes. T.F.H. Publications, Neptune City, New Jersey. 941 p.
Eschmeyer, W.N., E.S. Herald and H. Hammann (1983) A field guide to Pacific coast fishes of North America. Boston (MA, USA): Houghton Mifflin Company. xii+336 p.
Allen, M.J. and G.B. Smith (1988) Atlas and zoogeography of common fishes in the Bering Sea and northeastern Pacific. NOAA Tech. Rep. NMFS 66, 151 p.
Hart, J.L. (1973) Pacific fishes of Canada. Bull. Fish. Res. Board Can. 180:740 p.
Patzner, R.A. (2008) Reproductive strategies of fish. pp. 311-350. In Rocha, M.J., A. Arukwe and B.G. Kapoor (eds). Fish reproduction: cytology, biology and ecology. Science Publisher, Inc. Oxford. 631 p.
Vinnikov, K.A., R.C. Thomson and T.A. Munroe (2018) Revised classification of the righteye flounders (Teleostei: Pleuronectidae) based on multilocus phylogeny with complete taxon sampling. Molecular phylogenetics and evolution, 125:147-162. DOI: 10.1016/j.ympev.2018.03.014
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