By Patrick Cooney
Can you say ‘potamodromous‘ and can you guess what it means?
Mood disorder from eating too many potatoes.
An aquatic dinosaur that crawled across land.
A migration of fish entirely in freshwater.
If you pronounced it like ‘poe-tuh-moe-droe-miss’, then you are off to a great start. But what about the meaning? For such a strange word, it simply signifies option C, a migration of fish entirely in freshwater.
Many fishes migrate long distances to spawn. In order to better understand these movements, scientists have classified these migrations into several categories.
Anadromous fish are born in freshwater, then migrate to the ocean as juveniles where they grow into adults before migrating back into freshwater to spawn.
Examples: salmon, smelt, American shad, hickory shad, striped bass, lamprey, gulf sturgeon
Catadromous fish are born in saltwater, then migrate into freshwater as juveniles where they grow into adults before migrating back into the ocean to spawn.
Examples: American eel, European eel, inanga, shortfin eel, longfin eel
Amphidromous fish are born in freshwater/estuaries, then drift into the ocean as larvae before migrating back into freshwater to grow into adults and spawn.
Examples: bigmouth sleeper, mountain mullet, sirajo goby, river goby, torrentfish, Dolly Varden
Potamodromous fish are born in upstream freshwater habitats, then migrate downstream (still in freshwater) as juveniles to grow into adults before migrating back upstream to spawn.
Examples: sicklefin redhorse, lake sturgeon, robust redhorse, flathead catfish
Oceanodromous fish are born near spawning grounds, then drift on ocean currents as larvae before settling as juveniles to grow into adults before migrating back to spawning grounds.
Examples: black grouper, mutton snapper, goliath grouper
Although these different types of migration classifications may be difficult to pronounce, they are important to understand in order to help maintain connectivity between critical habitats.
Considering that many of these fishes use rivers as migration corridors:
1) What impacts might you expect dams to have on the ability of fish to get from one location to another?
2) Might impacts to riverine ecosystems propagate impacts on oceanic ecosystems, and vice versa?
Be sure to check out The Fisheries Blog on Facebook, or check out The Fisheries Blog on Twitter (@FisheriesBlog).
Also check out last week’s post about why fish need floods.
The Fisheries Blog 
Don't forget diadromous – see the late R. MacDowell book by same name
flathead catfish = Potadromous? Double check on that…
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Please note references information
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Could have sworn it would have been from eating too many potatoes. Dang. But in all seriousness, nice info, it can be hard to juggle all of the “-adromous” terminology
Does the term “adfluvial” have the same meaning as is being described for “potadromous” here?
Thanks for the given fish migrations but also talk about other terms like limnondromous.
Are there other conditions to base on to categorize fish migrations other than spawning?
Is potandromous similar to potamodromous?
I loved this article. It was interesting in its geographical information and its human interest. 💦
I’ve watched eels jump up the water fall where we like to go swimming in the summer. The are cool looking but still creep me out a bit.😬
wonderful to see these amazing creatures. strange to think that we probably know more about dinosaurs than eels! 🐍 i went to a great talk about them earlier in the year and discovered that they can travel across (wet) land to reach rivers when on migration. 🐍
I really loved this blog and everyday I do see something new which most of the time adds to my knowledge and motivated me to do things differently. Thanks
what happen to the male eel when they reached their adult stage
Thank you very much for the information, as a researcher for 3 years, I am still gathering information about eels because I am in a conservation project for eels
This is great!!! Please make some addition i enjoy my study
No exact difference between catadromous anadromous amphidromous oceanosromous
Great information on eels, you can also check our fish database of more than 102,000 scientific species.
Interesting. Thank you for the information!