Common Bream

A shiny fish

The Swedish name for the common bream, braxen, is derived from an Old Norse word, braxn, meaning ‘to shine’. The bream is a common fish in Sweden and considered a table fish, but it is very bony.

Smacking sound

The common bream lives in fresh and brackish water in areas with soft bottoms. Its protractile mouth is adapted to seeking out and sucking food from the bottom. When the bream has sucked in bottom material, it filters out anything inedible through the gill covers. This manner of feeding emits a kind of smacking sound that is characteristic of the bream.

Group dormancy

In the winter, large shoals of bream gather and enter into a kind of group dormancy on deep bottoms. Bream also gather in early summer to spawn. The spawning may last for days and involves a lot of splashing. A female can lay up to 300,000 eggs in a single spawning. The common bream matures sexually rather slowly; they are usually sexually mature after 3–6 years, but in colder areas it can take up to 10 years before the bream is ready to spawn.