Snake Head Fish

[andrew chadwick]

I dont know if I would call them great eating if you havent tried them. Carp are a supposed to be a food fish, and hardly anyone here eats them.

Plus it looks like a bowfin, and I have never heard of someone eating a bowfin before.

[UncleKes]

The Snakehead is a fish that is native to Southeast Asia. (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc.) Many Asian restaurants and grocery sotres sold them over the years because they are very good to eat. However, somehow or other they got into the rivers and lakes in some areas of the USA.

The Snake head has another interesting feature. It can breath air and walk on its fins on land for up to half a mile. This means that it has the capacity to move from one lake to another or from river to lake or vice versa.

Because of its temperment and voracious appetite the snake head quicky becomes the dominent predator in native waters. It has no natural enemies here and eats everything in its way. Even musikes have fallen prey to them (or so I have read) However it mostly seeks out and eats the smaller fish that are the prey of all the rest of the fish in a system. Without these small fish the food chain is disrupted and real damage can be done to a system.

The bad news is that fish and game biologists know very little about this fish. The good news is that it seems to be a warm water fish and it does not do well in our colder lakes and rivers up north.

It will have to be seen what the scientists and biologists can go to control or eradicate this fish! They may have to import some natural predator that eats Snakehead to get a handle on it.

Like most exotic species once you get it in the system it is almost 99$ certain you will have to live with it. You may be able to control it but you will never get rid of it!

[UncleKes]

Chadwick! Carp are the number one game fish in the world. They are excellent eating! They are a very oily fish and the oil in the meat is very rancid. That is why you need to get the oil out of them before you can cook them. That is what smoking them does. It slowly sweats the oil from the fish and the oil drops woen on the ground and away from the fish.

Take a rack and a cake pan. Place the rack inside the cake pan and put the carp (either filleted or just gutted and scaled on the rack. put the cake pan in the oven at 250 and bake it for 45 minutes on low heat.

A better method is to use a covered barbecue for this purpose and cook the fish using the indirect method of placing a drip pan in the middle and the coals on the sides of the drip pan.

After the oil has been sweated out of the fish you can fry it or bake it or cook it anyway you like and the fish is marvelous!

In Europe they eat carp and you will findit on the menus of some of the worlds finest restuarants.

The fish is not native to America. It was brough to the USA by President Ulysses S. Grant in the 1870's to replace the trout which were dying because of industrial pollution from the manufacturing that took place on the rivers in the Eastern part of the USA.

You might have a hard time scaling carp however. They have very hard bony oversize scales. If you have a tough time do what you do with ducks to remove their feathers. Take a large stock pot of water and bring it to a boil. Place the unscaled carp in boiling water for a minute or two. This method is called "FLENSING" by the way at it will loosen the scales so you can dress the fish.

Did you know that the "REDFISH" of Louisiana and Gulf Coast Fame is just a SHEEPHEAD! It is quite true. The correct name for this fish is "FRESHWATER DRUM". It has the limited capacity to live in brackish (slat and fresh water mixed) along the coastal areas. One of its favorite foods is a kind of shrimp that lives in brackish waters. When it eats this shrimp it takes on a sort of pinkish color. When Cajun settlers in Louisiana first encountered this fish the named it REDFISH and the name stuck. The Pink Flamingo you gets pink for the same reason. It eats the same shrimp and gets pink colored as a result. Take Pink Flamingos and feed them something else and they will quickly become the natural whte they are born with!

Drum is quite good although many people turn their nose up at it. These are probably the same people who thought catfish was a trash fish and kept it so for years until the DNR got wise to what a great tasting fish it really was and started to manage the the resource about 20 years ago.

The point of all this is that there are lots of different fish out there that are good to eat, fight hard and are accessible to us if we would only give up our prejudices about them. Many of them are good to eat too!

Good Luck! Tight Lines!

Uncle Kes

[dashtek]

UncleKes...there is really no good news here. These fish exist in Wisconsin so they can likely live in our lakes too.

http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/innews/snakeheadwis2003.html

[slipperybob]

I think the particular species that was first ID's as the invasive monster that we all associate this fish to be was a northern variety that's probably native to Korea or northern China. Meaning that it can survive well enough in cold water. Like the one reported in WI.

It's just like the hyped goby that should've destroyed the entire great lakes fish population and supposedly decimate the smallmouth bass. Now there's trophy sized smallmouths that gorge themselves on gobies.

Snakehead fish is supposedly able to reach up to 15 lbs. Musky, pikes, and lakers are a lot bigger then that. Who's gonna eat who? Who ever has bigger mouth I guess. It would be interesting to see how the teeth are in a snakehead fish. Maybe there's not a picture of that because it doesn't drive the hype of it as portrayed to be such a voracious predator. Toothy gars look more scary.

[blackdog1101]

Here are a few pics of a snakehead. Evidently there are "Northern" snakeheads and "Giant" snakeheads. These are Giant snakeheads. Not something we want in our waters. The lower pic is of a fish that was found in a MD river.

[Lowblazah]

 Originally Posted By: chadwick

Plus it looks like a bowfin, and I have never heard of someone eating a bowfin before.

I know someone...they thought it was an eelpout and cleaned it and then tried eating it. Needless to say they weren't impressed with what was supposed to be "Poor mans lobster".

I had to print him off a photo to show him what he actually ate was a bowfin...I think he threw up in his mouth a little after realizing I was right.

[blackdog1101]

 Originally Posted By: Lowblazah

I had to print him off a photo to show him what he actually ate was a bowfin...

Yuck!!

[slipperybob]

That's a mean looking toothy fish...Thanks for the photos.

I definitely won't mistake it for an eelpout.

Hmmm the "giant" kin would be bad. Now wouldn't this fish be similar to ancient evolutionary fish to land link?

[CrappieFshr651]

Somebody put this up as a bulletin on my myspace. Mean lookin fish

The giant snakehead is a carnivorous fish that feasts on pretty much anything in its path, and has caused all manner of destruction in places where it has been introduced. With the recent discovery of the fish in Britain, officials are scrambling to find a possible solution to this dreaded environmental issue.

Maybe you think it’s overstating the problem a bit. After all it’s just a fish, right? Wrong. This is not your everyday fish. For one thing, the giant snakehead can kill you. Female snakeheads have been known to attack and sometimes actually kill human beings who get too close to juvenile fish.

The giant snakehead will eat absolutely everything in a body of water then crawl over land to the next pond or lake. If there’s an infestation near any other bodies of water, those other areas are almost sure to be infested soon because the snakehead can survive four days out of water while it looks for a new home.

The fish is the pinnacle in dangerous and effective invasive species. Officials in the U.S. had to fight an invasion of the fish with the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. Snipers were placed around invaded bodies of water with shoot on sight orders. Whole lakes were poisoned, wiping out hundreds of other fish in the process, to stop the snakefish from spreading. Even these measures weren’t 100% effective.

So you can imagine the fear when British wildlife officials heard that one of the toothy monsters was hooked by a fisherman in Lincolnshire. According to the Sun newspaper, an environment agency rep said: “The reaction was, ‘Oh s***’.” You know you’re dealing with a serious environmental problem when people from environmental agencies start cursing in newspapers. (It’s probably worth pointing out, however, that the Sun is not exactly known as a hotbed of serious environmental journalism. They’re far more famous for having a daily picture of boobs on their third page.)

Nobody is quite sure how the fish got there. The species is native to South-east Asia, where it is kept in fish ponds or reservoirs as a game fish. They’re apparently quite fun to catch, and they’re also considered quite tasty in China. The species, however, is banned in Britain. It is assumed the fish was a pet that was released in the wild, as that is how the species was introduced in America.

England does have one thing going for it; it’s really cold. The snakehead thrives in warmer water, and the freezing waters in northern England may help take care of the problem before it spirals out of control.

[dougger222]

I got a chance to see the episode on Snakefish on natgeo a month or so ago. The first snakefish caught was in Crofton pond and the angler took a picture and tossed it back. Thought it was in 2002 but could be wrong. He gave the picture to a conservation officer who sent it to Florida were it was identified as a snakefish. A week later a snakefish was caught and killed from the pond. Soon after several very young snakefish were found. Within a year the whole body of water was poisoned. Not long after snakefish were banned in the US. At one time snakefish could be bought at pet stores.

Snakefish were found in California at a meat market. A sting operation took place and a shipment of live snakefish from Asia were found. The market was fined over $100K. They had been getting live shipments of the fish for a number of years.

The episode said they mated up to 5 times a year but suspect mating is actualy spawning. If they could live here more than likely they wouldn't be able to reproduce that many times due to the cold.

The episode also showed a giant snakehead being caught in it's native waters, looked like a real fighter!

The jumping carp are bad, the snakefish are far worse.

[joeyquicksand*]

I want to eat one too... mmmmm yummmmm invasive species.

[slipperybob]

after reading some net-information...

Looks like a typical snakehead is an ambush type of predator with preference to cover and concealment. Meaning it's not going to cruise around following a school of baitfish.

There were other info like young snakeheads may leap out onto lillypads and bite down an insect or little frog and then flip itself back into water.

Other info about how adult snakeheads generally bite down their prey in half before consuming it. That's some powerful jaws. Don't tease the snakehead fish...

[Wallmaster]

"SNIPERS" You might have one slither by you while you are napping on the edge of the water bank

[CrappieFshr651]

nasty fish