Battle scarred Bream

[MIKOS]

Hi all,

I was fishing at the pin on Monday morning and caught this poor little fella.

The wound was recent and uninfected.

What happened to him does anyone know?

I threw him back in straight after the photo and he took off like lightning.

Mike ;)

[fish2eat]

The obvious bit is the chunk of flesh missing....but when you look longer, there is a bit of tail gone as well, so he was probably attacked from the rear.

Most predators will try and swallow whole, front first.....so my guess is a large tailor

Gives a bit of a lie to those who were saying in another post that fish feel pain....he was obviously still thinking about food...not sure I'd be hungry with a chunk missing out of me that proportion of my body.

[fish2eat]

Unless you did it with the bloodied knife in the foreground, botched the filleting job and threw it back when the boating and fisheries patrol came around the corner ??? LOL

[bo_sawyer]

lol.... was thinkin the same thing....

if it was a tailor it would of have to been a pretty big one thats for sure! looks like the predator had shallow teeth....

i bet you didnt put ur hands in the water when you released him mate ;)

[MIKOS]

The blood on the knife is from the tailor I caught. ;)

Bo d,
The water where this guy was caught was on the edge of where it goes from cloudy to clean blue close to the bank.There was alot of run off out of the creek at the change of the tide.I reckon there was more quality around this size but the time that i got there the current was running quite fast.

Im going down again on Friday and will try back in the same area.

Poor little guy he was good enough to eat but I thought id give him another chance.

Mike :)

[bo_sawyer]

has the tailor fishin been average lately. Went there a while back only to catch a heap of choppers.

well good luck, let us know how u go...

Cheers.

[eyecandy2723]

thats a strange looking bite i cant see how a fishes mouth could bite such a large peace ,but bite so shallow as just looks like a knife cut to me its just such a clean cut
:o

[MIKOS]

Eyecandy2723,

Thats what I thought when I first saw it.

It looked like someone sliced him for some bait as it was such a clean cut.

Bo d,

heaps of choppers around. Check my report in the estuary section.

Mike ;)

[bo_sawyer]

i cant wait to be out there in the pin when the bigger ones arrive. does anybody what months the bigger tailor start comin in the pin?

[straddie]

Bit hard to tell from a pic but it could be a healing ulcer. In the old wets there used to be quite a lot of bream in the rivers would get ulcers supposedly from all the fresh but more likely the chemicals washed down with it in my opinion.

It's possible that one might have been healing up :-/ but I am guessing, just with no damage to the fins a bite doesn't seem so likely. :-?

[fish2eat]

Bit hard to tell from a pic but it could be a healing ulcer. In the old wets there used to be quite a lot of bream in the rivers would get ulcers supposedly from all the fresh but more likely the chemicals washed down with it in my opinion.

It's possible that one might have been healing up #:-/ but I am guessing, just with no damage to the fins a bite doesn't seem so likely. #:-?





huh???? have another look at the tailfin

[straddie]

My eyes aren't so good these days but I saw the tail when I first looked at it. If it's a bite, the mark suggests it came from above and should have caused damage to the dorsal which isn't there bar for a possible small mark on his 4th dorsal spine.

If it's a bite to do that, an estuary cod or wobby would be the likely suspects, but looking at the pic I'm not convinced. If it was a tailor of any size let alone one that could take 3/4 of a bream that size down its throat then it is going to have a lot more damage than some skin missing and a slightly frayed tail.

But as I said I am guessing having only seen the fish in a picture.

[jackash]

Agree with straddie. A tailor big enough to take on that fish/ take a chunk that big out would definitely do more damage than that!! I wouldnt ahve a clue as to what it is but i dont think a tailor.
Cheers
Jackash

[once_bitten]

boat prop [smiley=huh2.gif]


just a guess. seems more likely to me


cheers nino

[Panda]

Wouldn't like to guess about the mechanism of injury without seeing the other side of him. I have seen fish with big scrapes down their sides where they have escaped from the jaws of death. But I haven't seen that on one side only. I have also seen bream in particular with nasty ulcers of exposed raw flesh on their bodies, but never of this size.

I am not so sure the tattered tail was sustained at the same time as the injury. Injured or sick fish often find their way up into the creeks to escape big predators, but in doing so they expose themselves to lots of nasty nipping little midges of fish who will go after a free meal off an injured/sick fish.

Fish2eats comment that this somehow proves that the argument that fish feel pain is a "lie" is pretty absurd. Injured individuals of every species will continue to eat if they have a will to survive and are well enough to forage. That includes everything down the food chain from humans and down past fish. The argument that fish continue feeding when they are hurt because they don't feel pain is pretty silly. It doesn't apply to any other species including ourselves and it certainly doesn't apply to fish.

Last year, while chasing bait in the creek I saw a poor old mullet with no tail at all. None at all, it was chopped off at the stump. Probably by a barracuda I suppose. He was doing his best to swim and stay alive but all the little fish were following him around and nipping off a free feed of his raw tail stump. Nature is pretty cruel sometimes, so I threw the cast net and turned him into slab bait.

[Scott15]

Looks like someone wanted a FRESH strip of bait

[sharkymark2]

Hi Mikos I also got a bream at the Bedrooms with the back 1/3 of him bitten off. It was a very large bream and a fairly narrow bite. It looked like a mouth shape of a big green back. not the broader bite of one of those friends of Jacques coustou. Maybe it was the Dreaded "jaguar shark" from "The life Aquatic............... Ps no friends of mine. >:( ;D

[DICER]

Nature is neither cruel nor kind

This bream was "sashimied" and escaped to live another day.

My guess it was a large shark catching the bream side on. The dorsal fin may have protected it to some degree. Looks fresh to me ~1 to 2 days.

[fish_outta_water]

ive seen mullet and trout that have been attacked by sea eagles which normaly leave wounds accross the back but on bothside of the fish , and generaly not in that formation . good luck findin the culprit ;) :-/

[88fishframe]

Were there any surgeon fish or grey nurse sharks about? He may have just come out of an operation for scale liposuction :o

[shaman]

Maybe some catch&release fisho felt like a feed of sashimi.
Watch out for a greenie with a tube of wasabi ;D ;D