Flathead trout
Salmo platycephalus · Salmonidae
- Freshwater
- Salmonids
- Hard
- Size
55 cm
Where to fish
- River
Habitat icons: Flaticon
A salmonid endemic to the mountain streams of southern Turkey, recognisable by its slightly flattened head and olive-brown body speckled with red spots. An extremely rare and protected species confined to the Ceyhan basin and a few isolated tributaries.
Calendar
Recorded in 1 country
Türkiye
GBIF occurrence records — native and introduced populations combined.
Areas
- Turkish mountain rivers
- Rocky riffles
- Moderate current zones
Techniques
- Fly fishing
- Nymphing
- Toc fishing
Baits
- Dry fly
- Artificial nymph
- Aquatic larva
How to catch it
There is not enough on record to write a method. Neither the biology, nor the diet, nor the breeding calendar of this trout appears in the reference databases; the only established measurements are a published maximum standard length and a single female of 21.8 cm, and a gap that wide says more about how few fish have been measured than about any difference between the sexes. Anything written about fishing for it would be lifted from another species and presented as its own.
The emptiness is itself information. It describes a rare fish, restricted to one network of mountain rivers, on which nobody has had the opportunity to accumulate observations. Conditions of access to those rivers are a matter for the Turkish administration.
Conservation · Endangered (IUCN) — This species is threatened with extinction. Always release it (no-kill), handle it with the utmost care and check local rules — fishing for it may be prohibited.
Conservation
The species amounts to a single Anatolian river network. At that scale the distinction between heavy pressure and moderate pressure stops meaning anything: one dam, one abstraction point, or one consignment of farmed trout tipped into that network does not shrink the range, it ends it.
The file is thin. No threat is detailed in the sources, which is not the same as there being none — the available assessment is more than ten years old and nothing has been reviewed since. A commercial fishery, meanwhile, is listed among the recorded uses.
The gap between those two entries is the situation in one line: a fish almost nothing is known about, which is being taken anyway.
Regulations
Check the local regulations in force (legal size limits, closed seasons, bag limits).
For guidance only. Legal sizes, quotas and open seasons vary by location and season: always check the local regulations in force before fishing.
Other names
Anatolian trout is the name in circulation, and flathead trout is the other, a straight rendering of platycephalus. The literature uses both, which is a fair sign of how recently the fish acquired an identity of its own in English at all.
That identity came out of a general reordering. A 2009 revision of the Anatolian trout separated resident and migratory forms living side by side in the same northern rivers and raised them to full species, and the genus in Turkey now carries a count of taxa that older writing filed without distinction under Salmo trutta. Anything published before that revision has to be read with the possibility that it concerns a different animal.
Sources: fishbase.se · api.gbif.org
