Critically Endangered
Allis shad
Alosa alosa
Allis shad is a ray-finned fish in the family Clupeidae (order Clupeiformes) — Alosa alosa, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
The gill cover is ridged and the scales large. The back is a bluish-green colour and the head brownish with a golden tinge on the operculum. The flanks are silvery, sometimes with a bronzy tinge, and a distinctive large dark spot occurs just behind the gill cover, and occasionally one to six smaller spots behind that.
The adult length is typically 30 to 60 cm (12 to 24 in).
Range and habitat
The allis shad is found in the eastern Atlantic in waters bordering most of Europe and northwestern Africa, and it enters to the western Baltic and western Mediterranean Seas, but it is rare outside and increasingly within France. It is found in the eastern Atlantic Ocean, the western Baltic Sea and the western Mediterranean Sea. This fish becomes mature when three or more years old and migrates to estuaries, later swimming up rivers to spawn.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
It is an anadromous fish that migrates into fresh water to spawn.
In crisis
Populations of this fish have declined due to overfishing, pollution and habitat destruction. Populations have been reduced primarily by overfishing, pollution, and habitat destruction. Siltation and gravel mining threaten spawning locations.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the species as critically endangered in 2024, citing an estimated global population decline of around 80% over the past 20 years, leaving many small relict subpopulations and extirpating others.
Allis shad is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Allis shad, Wikidata item Q300997. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
