page_title: Lake Baikal
section_title: Wildlife
hierarchical_section_title: Lake Baikal / Wildlife
caption_attribution_description: Omul fish, endemic to Lake Baikal (Russia). Smoked and on sale at Listvyanka market.
context_page_description: Lake Baikal is a huge lake in Siberia, Russia. It is the biggest fresh water reservoir in the world. The lake is near Irkutsk.
  Baikal is about 636 kilometres long. It is 20 to 80 kilometres wide. At it’s deepest point, it is 1,700 meters deep. With this depth it is the deepest lake on Earth. The lake is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It holds about 20% of the world's unfrozen surface fresh water,
  The lake has fish that exist only here and nowhere else. It is home to more than 1,700 species of plants and animals, two-thirds of which can be found nowhere else in the world.
context_section_description: Lake Baikal has over 1000 species of plants and 1550 species and varieties of animals. Over 60% of animals are endemic; that means of 52 species of fish 27 are endemic.
  The omul fish (Coregonus autumnalis migratorius) is local to Lake Baikal. It is fished, smoked, and sold on all markets around the lake. For many travellers on the Trans-Siberian railway, purchasing smoked omul is one of the highlights of the long journey.
  Baikal also hosts a species of seals, Baikal seal or nerpa.
  Bears and deer can be watched and hunted by Baikal coasts.
caption: Omul Fish on Listyanka market
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