Among the most common representatives of whitefish throughout Siberia (including the water bodies of the Taimyr Peninsula) is the whitefish Coregonus lavaretus pidschian, represented by numerous forms and races throughout its vast range [22; 23], which has a high morphological and genetic variability [1; 3; 6; 7; 9–13; 20; 26; 28; 32; 33].
In the Khatanga basin, whitefish is distributed everywhere from the upper reaches of the Kheta and Kotuy rivers to the Khatanga Bay. It occurs in large tributaries of the Maimeche, Bolshaya and Malaya Balakhna, and Popigai rivers. Widely distributed in the continental (Labaz, Chaikino, Podkhrebetnoe, Tonovskoye, etc.) and floodplain lakes. The most widespread are lacustrine and fluviolacustrine forms. In large lakes, whitefish are subdivided into coastal, deep-water, and pelagic ones with different feeding habits, from typical planktophages to typical benthophages. Some whitefish are predatory. These whitefish differ in terms of spawning: fluvial and lacustrine whitefish spawn at the end of November-December, fluviolacustrine - in the third decade of September to the second decade of October. According to the same criteria, many authors divide these whitefishes into forms (subpopulations) [12; 15; 19; 22; 26]. Three forms of whitefish were previously identified in the Khatanga basin: fluviolacustrine, lacustrine, and fluvial [15–17].
The material for the publication was collected in 2013–2019 in the Khatanga River basin. The work uses critically analyzed survey data from commercial fishermen and the local population on the distribution of whitefish in water bodies of the river basin, such as the Popigai, Volochanka, Kheta, Kotuy, Khatanga and Khatanga Bay rivers.
Whitefish were caught at water temperatures ranging from 4°C to 10°C. Cast nets 70 to 150 m long, 1.5–5 m high, with a mesh size of 10 mm in the wings and mote, and fixed gillnets with a landing height of 3 and 6 m and a mesh of 50–65 mm were used as fishing gear. Seine casting was carried out in the evening from 8 p.m. to 12 a.m. (the Khatanga River) and in the daytime (the Kheta and Kotuy rivers) in the coastal zone, at depths from 1 to 5 m. The exposure of the nets was 24 hours.