Endangered
Salmo ohridanus
Salmo ohridanus
Salmo ohridanus, also known by the local name as the belvica in North Macedonia or belushka in Albania, is a freshwater salmonid fish, endemic to Lake Ohrid in Albania and North Macedonia.
Appearance
Nevertheless, it is quite distinct from the brown trout complex.
Salmo ohridanus is a relatively small fish, usually shorter than 30 cm (12 in) and less than 0.5 kg (1.1 lb) weight.
Range and habitat
Salmo ohridanus, also known by the local name as the belvica in North Macedonia or belushka in Albania, is a freshwater salmonid fish, endemic to Lake Ohrid in Albania and North Macedonia. It has also been intentionally hybridized with another endemic species, the Ohrid trout (Salmo letnica). In earlier literature the belvica has variously been treated as belonging to suggested endemic genera Acantholingua and Salmothymus.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
Salmonids need cold, oxygenated water and a clean gravel or open-lake feeding ground. Endemic whitefishes collapse when the lake is eutrophied or fished out.
In crisis
It is threatened by the hybridization, degradation of water quality and overfishing. But the stock remains abundant.
Salmo ohridanus is 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 Salmo ohridanus, Wikidata item Q134339. 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.
