Payara
Fish · Last reviewed 2026-08-10
An Amazonian predator with two enormous lower fangs that pass through sockets in its own skull, hunting in fast rapids and whitewater.
Safety
Species that bite — Can cause serious injury or death
The lower fangs are several centimetres long and cause deep puncture wounds; a thrashing payara at the boat is a genuine injury risk.
What reduces it: Never handle the head or place hands near the mouth. Use long pliers, control the fish across the body, and keep others clear during landing.
Moving water and currents — Can cause serious injury or death
This fishing takes place around rapids and fast channels in remote country where a fall or a capsize carries serious risk.
What reduces it: Wear a buoyancy aid, use experienced local boatmen, and treat the water rather than the fish as the principal hazard.
Payara is the fish with the fangs. Two teeth in the lower jaw grow to several centimetres in a large fish, and they are long enough that the skull carries a pair of sockets in the upper jaw for them to pass into when the mouth closes.
Those fangs are impaling tools. Payara hunt in fast turbulent water below rapids and in whitewater rivers of the Amazon and Orinoco basins, striking prey from beneath and driving the fangs through it rather than gripping and swallowing.
It is a hard-fighting, fast, aerial fish on rod and line, and the combination of the habitat and the teeth makes it one of the more demanding freshwater targets in South America.
Identification
FishingHQ holds no photograph of this species whose identity and licensing it can vouch for, so it is not showing one. Misidentified fish photographs teach identification wrongly, and a picture with an unchecked caption would be worse than none. The identification points below are what to look at instead.
- Scientific name
- Hydrolycus scomberoides
- Family
- Cynodontidae
- Water
- Freshwater
- Conservation status
- Least Concern
- Regions
- Central & South America
- Two very long fangs projecting upward from the lower jaw, with matching sockets in the upper jaw.
- Deep, laterally compressed silver body with a strongly upturned mouth.
- Large adipose fin and a deeply forked tail with dark margins.
- Blue-silver flanks with dark blotches at the shoulder in many individuals.
Size
- Typical
- 2–7 kg (4.4–15 lb)
- Large
- 10–17 kg (22–37 lb)
Exceptional: FishBase records a maximum of 117 cm and 17.8 kg
Lifecycle and reproduction
Fast-growing and adapted to high-energy river habitat, concentrating below rapids and falls where prey is disoriented. Populations depend on free-flowing rivers with intact rapids.
Spawns in the wet season with rising water in main river channels. Detailed reproductive data for the species are limited, and the catalogue does not supply what the sources do not.
Feeding and senses
Impales small fish on the lower fangs, striking from below in turbulent water. Prey is taken whole after being pierced rather than cut.
Hunts by sight and by lateral-line detection in fast, aerated, often turbid water, keying on disoriented prey moving through rapids.
Through the year
Concentrates below rapids and in fast channels in low water, disperses more widely on the wet-season flood. Access to the fishing is largely governed by river level.
Distribution
Native range as recorded by FishBase for Hydrolycus scomberoides.
This is a biological range — where the species occurs, not a prediction that you will catch one. To browse the fishing geography FishingHQ holds, start at fishing places.
Why anglers care
A specialist destination target in Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil and Guyana, taken on large lures, jigs and live bait fished in and below rapids. Its significance is the combination of extreme dentition, difficult water and a fast aerial fight. Practitioner consensus is that hook-ups are difficult because the mouth is largely bone, and that wire or heavy fluorocarbon is required.
Handling and returning
The fangs cause deep puncture wounds and the fish thrashes hard. Never place a hand near the mouth, use long pliers or a dehooker, control the body, and support large fish horizontally. The water it is fished in is itself hazardous.
Two fangs that go all the way through, and a jaw that must never be gripped
Payara are named for the pair of enormous lower canines that project upward past the head when the mouth closes, sliding into sheaths in the upper jaw. They are impalement teeth: the fish strikes prey and the fangs pass through it. Nothing about the handling of this fish is ordinary.
THE INJURY IS A DEEP PUNCTURE, and it is usually self-inflicted by an angler trying to hold the head. A payara's fangs will go through a hand, and the sheathing arrangement means that a fish which closes its mouth on a finger has driven the tooth in and locked it. There is no version of lipping this fish that is safe.
HANDLE IT BEHIND THE HEAD, over the shoulders, with a gloved hand or a wet cloth, body supported, head pointed away. Long pliers to the hook, always. If the fish is deeply hooked, cut the trace.
THE MOUTH IS ALSO BONY, which affects hooking as much as handling: hooks slip on hard tissue, fish come off, and a fish that comes off at the boat is a fish thrashing with a lure at hand height.
AND THE ENVIRONMENT COMPOUNDS EVERYTHING. This is fishing in fast tropical rivers, often from small boats below rapids, at distance from medical help. A deep puncture wound in that setting is a serious matter for reasons that have nothing to do with the fish. Carry the means to clean and close a wound, and treat any puncture from freshwater fish teeth as one that will become infected unless properly dealt with.
Practitioner consensus
Widely and independently recommended by experienced anglers and specialist sources. This is real angling knowledge, not proof: controlled evidence for it is limited, and FishingHQ records it as convention rather than as a demonstrated effect.
- FishBase: a global information system on fishes — Froese, R. and D. Pauly, eds. — FishBase Consortium (Scientific institute)Relied on for: Dentition, fin and spine morphology, body form, air-breathing capability and distribution for the species, which are the anatomical facts the handling practice below follows from.States this directlyPassage read and verified
- General angling website restatements of established technique — Various (Credible secondary source)Relied on for: Widely restated angling practice for handling this species, recorded as practitioner consensus rather than as tested fact.Background and mechanism onlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
Where to go next
How it is caught
- JiggingLarge lures and jigs fished in and below rapids, on wire or heavy fluorocarbon.
- SpinningLarge lures and jigs fished in and below rapids, on wire or heavy fluorocarbon.
What these connections rest on (2)
Practitioner consensus — 2 connections
Widely and independently recommended by experienced anglers and specialist sources. This is real angling knowledge, not proof: controlled evidence for it is limited, and FishingHQ records it as convention rather than as a demonstrated effect.
Jigging
A practitioner claim about how Hydrolycus scomberoides is commonly fished, following from where and how it feeds.
- General angling website restatements of established technique — Various (Credible secondary source)Relied on for: Widely restated practitioner accounts of fishing for payara.Citation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
- Sea Angler — Bauer Media (Specialist angling publication)Relied on for: Practitioner treatment of the methods used for payara and comparable species.Citation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
Spinning
A practitioner claim about how Hydrolycus scomberoides is commonly fished, following from where and how it feeds.
- General angling website restatements of established technique — Various (Credible secondary source)Relied on for: Widely restated practitioner accounts of fishing for payara.Citation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
- Sea Angler — Bauer Media (Specialist angling publication)Relied on for: Practitioner treatment of the methods used for payara and comparable species.Citation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
Where it lives
- Floodplains, backwaters and oxbowsHunts the fast water at channel mouths and rapids, taking fish moving between the channel and the floodplain as levels change.
- Lowland riversHunts in fast turbulent water below rapids in amazon and orinoco rivers.
What these connections rest on (2)
Scientific evidence — 2 connections
Supported by peer-reviewed research or fisheries science. The sources are listed and can be checked.
Floodplains, backwaters and oxbows
A habitat association resting on the regional identification and fisheries literature rather than on angling report.
- The Flood Pulse Concept in River-Floodplain Systems — Canadian Special Publication of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 106, Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Ottawa, 1989 (Scientific literature)Relied on for: That fish move laterally onto the inundated floodplain to feed and breed and return to the channel as water falls, and that floodplain inundation drives production in large river systems.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
- FAO Species Identification Guides for Fishery Purposes and the FAO Species Catalogues — Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Scientific institute)Relied on for: Habitat association and distribution of the species concerned.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
Lowland rivers
A habitat association for Hydrolycus scomberoides taken from the environment and distribution data on its FishBase summary.
- FishBase: a global information system on fishes — Froese, R. and D. Pauly, eds. — FishBase Consortium (Scientific institute)Relied on for: The environment, depth range and habitat description recorded for Hydrolycus scomberoides.States this directlyPassage read and verified
Where you will find it
What these connections rest on (1)
Scientific evidence — 1 connection
Supported by peer-reviewed research or fisheries science. The sources are listed and can be checked.
The Amazon basin
A distribution association between an animal and a described water body, which is what the `inhabits` predicate is for — the kind of water rather than a named mark.
- FishBase: a global information system on fishes — Froese, R. and D. Pauly, eds. — FishBase Consortium (Scientific institute)Relied on for: Distribution, habitat association and depth range recorded for the species, including its occurrence in the water body concerned.States this directlyPassage read and verified
- The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species — International Union for Conservation of Nature (Conservation authority)Relied on for: Assessment and range account for the species, including the systems and coasts it occupies.Background and mechanism onlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
Understanding this fish
What these connections rest on (1)
Scientific evidence — 1 connection
Supported by peer-reviewed research or fisheries science. The sources are listed and can be checked.
How fish detect prey
A species joined to the mechanism it is a worked example of, written only where the species demonstrates the mechanism unusually clearly rather than where it is merely subject to it.
- FishBase: a global information system on fishes — Froese, R. and D. Pauly, eds. — FishBase Consortium (Scientific institute)Relied on for: Recorded environment, respiration, oxygen tolerance, feeding biology, growth, longevity and distribution of the species named.States this directlyPassage read and verified
- The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species — International Union for Conservation of Nature (Conservation authority)Relied on for: Conservation assessment, recorded threats and population trend of the species named.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
Sources for this page
- FishBase: a global information system on fishes — Froese, R. and D. Pauly, eds. — FishBase Consortium (Scientific institute)Relied on for: Family, maximum size, depth and environment, distribution and the IUCN assessment for Hydrolycus scomberoides.States this directlyPassage read and verified
- The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species — International Union for Conservation of Nature (Conservation authority)Relied on for: The Least Concern assessment for Hydrolycus scomberoides, assessed 14 July 2020.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
How FishingHQ labels evidence is explained in the evidence policy.