Word.ws English Dictionary

catadromous

catadromous adjective: living in fresh water as an adult, but breeding in the sea.

Adjective

catadromous (comparative more catadromous, superlative most catadromous)

  1. Living in fresh water as an adult, but breeding in the sea.
    • Bird migration routes favor marshes and river valleys, as do, more obviously, the movement of anadromous salmon and, the mirror image, catadromous eels, to mention only two of the numerous migrating fish species.2017, James C Scott, chapter 1, in Against the Grain, New Haven & London: Yale, →ISBN, page 53
  2. Of a fern in which the first veins in a frond segment are produced towards the base of the frond.

Antonyms of catadromous

Forms of catadromous

comparativemore catadromous
superlativemost catadromous

Origin of catadromous

From cata- + -dromous, by analogy with anadromous. Compare catanadromous.

Questions about catadromous

What does catadromous mean?
Catadromous means living in fresh water as an adult, but breeding in the sea.
What part of speech is catadromous?
Catadromous is an adjective.

Words near catadromous in the dictionary

  1. catadioptrics
  2. Catadman
  3. Catadman-Manabay
  4. catadrome
  5. catadromes
  6. catadromous
  7. catadromy
  8. Catadupa
  9. catadupe
  10. catadupes
  11. catafalco

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: catadromous (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “catadromous.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/catadromous. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.