The zander was first formally described in 1758 as Perca lucioperca by Carolus Linnaeus in volume 1 of the tenth edition of Systema Naturae and he gave the type locality as "European lakes".

[5] The zander is the largest member of the Percidae and it usually has a long and muscular body which bears some resemblance to a Northern pike (Esox lucius), hence the alternative English common name of pikeperch.

[7] They have large bulbous eyes[9] which are opaque when the fish is living in particularly turbid conditions, an adaptation to low light.

The IGFA All-Tackle world record zander was caught in Lago Maggiore, Switzerland in June 2016 weighing 11.48 kg (25.3 lb).

The zander is very widely distributed across Eurasia, occurring in the drainages of the Caspian, Baltic, Black, Aral, North and Aegean Sea basins.

[1] In the UK, zander was originally introduced in 1878 by Francis Russell, 9th Duke of Bedford, into lakes on his Woburn Abbey estate and soon after that into the Great Ouse Relief Channel in The Fens.

[9] British Waterways included zander among a "dirty dozen" non-native species most likely to harm native wildlife along rivers in Great Britain.

[14] Their success in establishing themselves was owed to a number of factors, one of which is that they are particularly well adapted to life in the slow-flowing, sparsely vegetated, rather murky waters that comprise so many of the British lowland rivers.

[16] Ecologists believe that if establishment occurs in the Great Lakes they will compete with game fish such as the closely related Walleye or the Yellow perch for food and habitat.

[16] In the Netherlands, zander may be found (natively) in many major waterways, including the Waal, Hollands Diep, and other distributaries or estuaries of the Rhine, and are also particularly common in the canals of Amsterdam.

[2] Studies around the Baltic Sea have found them to prey on the European smelt (Osmerus eperlanus), ruffe (Gymnocephalus cernua), European perch, vendace (Coregonus albula) and the common roach (Rutilus rutilus), They were also found to be cannibalistic on smaller zanders.

Its gastrointestinal tract can host the nematode Anisakis, which can be transmitted to humans if the fish is smoked, fried or otherwise cooked at temperatures lower than 50 °C (122 °F).

The zander is also a vector of the trematode Bucephalus polymorphus and may have been responsible for spreading the parasite to some French river systems during the 1960s and 1970s, leading to decreases in populations of native cyprinids.

In 2004, it was revealed that some restaurants in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area of Minnesota were serving imported zander instead of the closely related North American walleye (the state fish, and a popular food in the region).

[21] In Ohio, many restaurants were caught using juvenile zander fillets in the 40 to 80 gram range in place of the Lake Erie yellow perch.

In Finland, as a conservation measure, the law regulates the minimum size of zander considered mature enough to be eaten.

In July 2009, in a rare occurrence, a zander bit bathers swimming in the Swiss part of Lake Maggiore, sending two people to the emergency room; the worst bite inflicted a wound about 10 centimeters long.