In the Lower Ob basin, it inhabits in all the Ural Mountains tributaries.

It is distinguished from other Coregonus species by a lower body that has a roundish cross-section.

Tugun feeds on planktonic crustaceans and insect larvae.

Tugun itself has been a valuable food fish, but the populations have strongly declined.

[3] Coregonus tugun is distantly related to all other whitefishes, and may have diverged both from the common whitefish complex and from the Eurasian and American ciscoes already ten million years ago.