Thanks to their adhesive discs, lumpfish face no harm from rough seas or currents.

In search of lumpfish

The lumpfish (Cyclopterus lumpus) is a very unusual sea creature and makes its home in the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. It cannot swim very well and lives mainly on the seabed. But it does have an adhesive disc on its underside, which it uses to cling to the substrate, even in the strongest of currents. Once attached, it would take a great deal of force to remove this scaleless sea creature. Particularly large specimens can measure up to 70 centimeters long and weigh three kilograms.

Eleven of these creatures can be seen in the Archipelago Sea aquarium in the OZEANEUM. However, the search for these fish was in no way a simple task. Lumpfish are usually encountered when spawning in the shallow waters off the Baltic coast. But our aquarium staff were not blessed with such luck. Despite repeated attempts, their search was unsuccessful. Only in Norway were they finally able to find them, and they did so by chance. Traps were set that were actually intended to capture wrasse. They attached buoys to the traps for orientation. When they collected the buoys the next day, they found that tiny lumpfish had attached themselves! This was a wonderful yet unexpected surprise because the search ultimately proved much easier than at first thought.