Ladyfish (Elops saurus) is a saltwater, brackish species recorded in the United States. It is mainly found over estuary, at depths of 0–50 m.
Scientific name: Elops saurus · Water: Saltwater, Brackish
Size: up to 100 cm
The ladyfish (Elops saurus), also known as the tenpounder, is a member of the genus Elops, the only genus in the monotypic family Elopidae, and it is distinguished from its relatives by counts of gill rakers and vertebrae. It has a long, slender, rounded body covered in silvery scales, a terminal mouth and a deeply forked tail, and it is distributed in the western North Atlantic from New England to Florida and through the Gulf of Mexico, where its range overlaps that of the malacho (Elops smithi) in the southeast United States and the southern Gulf. The species spawns at sea and its transparent, laterally compressed larvae drift inshore into embayments, where the euryhaline juveniles live for two to three years in low-salinity estuaries or hypersaline lagoons before the subadults move down the embayments and the mature fish return offshore. In the United States it is a familiar light-tackle catch in Florida and the Gulf states, taken from shore and from boats on small jigs, spoons and shrimp; no specific fishing season is documented in the sources used here.
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