Each female spawn 1/7 of their body weight. When fertilized, the eggs become sticky and they attract to stones or rocky bottom. The eggs from the different females have different color, so that the lump of eggs guarded by one male may be both green, yellow and red.
The small lumpfishes growing up in the kelp forest, hide and seek to attach themselves with a suction disk on kelp blades, where we can see them as small buds. When they are a year old, and slightly larger than a Golf ball, they swim out into the open sea. Here they feed on plankton in 2-4 years before they wander back to the coast to spawn.
The species is found throughout the eastern Atlantic Ocean, North Sea, Baltic Sea and Barents Sea. Lumpfish may travel great distances in the ocean, and it is uncertain whether there are several distinct populations, and how large these are. In Norway, we estimate that the main population to be is fish spawning in Nordland, Troms and Finnmark, but there is fish spawning along for the rest of the coast.