What fish eat
What is established about how a species feeds, kept structurally separate from what anglers infer from it. Prey species are read from FishingHQ's own predation evidence, each of which names the prey by its scientific name.
What does northern pike eat?
Pike are ambush predators built around a single explosive acceleration rather than a pursuit. The body plan says it plainly: dorsal and anal fins set far back to act as a rear-mounted propulsion unit, a long jaw full of backward-raked teeth, and camouflage that works against weed and structure rather than in open water.
4 verified prey relationships.
What does zander eat?
Zander are low-light predators, and almost everything about how they feed follows from the eye. The retina carries a reflective tapetum lucidum — the layer that makes the eye glow in a torch beam — which multiplies the available light and gives the fish a hunting advantage in exactly the conditions where prey fish see worst: turbid water, deep water, dusk and dawn.
3 verified prey relationships.
What does walleye eat?
Walleye are the North American counterpart of zander in more than name — they are congeners, and they share the reflective tapetum lucidum that gives both fish their common names and their hunting advantage. The species feeds primarily at low light, moving from deeper water towards shallower feeding ground as light falls, and returning as it rises.
3 verified prey relationships.
What does muskellunge eat?
Muskellunge are the largest Esox and feed as an extreme version of the pike pattern: a very large ambush predator taking very large prey, infrequently. FishingHQ carries verified predation on yellow perch and on cisco.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does largemouth bass eat?
FishingHQ holds NO verified record of what largemouth bass eat, and this page says so rather than inventing one. What it does hold is the feeding biology, and the central fact is the gape.
No verified prey relationship yet — the page says so.
What does atlantic cod eat?
Almost everything unusual about how a cod feeds follows from cold water. Feeding activity rises as temperature falls across most of the range, which is the reverse of nearly every other fish an angler meets, and it is why the North Atlantic cod fisheries are winter fisheries rather than a summer inconvenience. The animal is built for finding food it cannot see.
3 verified prey relationships.
What does atlantic halibut eat?
The halibut is the flatfish that refuses to behave like one. Both eyes sit on the upper surface giving a wide upward field of view, and the fish uses it: halibut rise well off the seabed to take prey in the water column, which is not something plaice, sole or turbot do. That single behavioural fact reorganises the whole diet.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does atlantic horse mackerel eat?
Two feeding strategies live inside one species here, and which one is operating depends on how big the fish is. Small horse mackerel are planktivores. They feed on copepods and euphausiids in the water column, taking them individually by sight in a manner closer to a sardine than to a predator, and FishingHQ records that relationship at group level because that is the granularity the evidence has. Larger fish become piscivorous.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does atlantic mackerel eat?
A mackerel is a filter feeder and a hunter in the same body, and it switches between the two according to what is in front of it. When plankton is dense the fish swims with its mouth open and strains copepods and euphausiids from the water with its gill rakers. When fish are available it hunts them visually as a coordinated school, driving prey upwards until it is trapped against the surface — the behaviour that produces the visible boils that gulls work and anglers look for. Both connections are documented here, and the pairing is the point: the same fish that cannot be interested in anything bait-sized while filtering is, an hour later, the most aggressive visual predator in the water. The seasonal frame is metabolic.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does atlantic salmon eat?
A salmon's diet has two phases and one of them is not eating at all. At sea, essentially all of the animal's growth occurs, and it occurs quickly: a fish that left fresh water at a few tens of grams returns weighing kilograms. FishingHQ's two verified prey relationships — sandeel and capelin — are the northern marine forage species that make that possible, alongside the planktonic crustaceans that give the flesh its colour. On entering fresh water to spawn the fish effectively stops feeding and lives on stored reserves.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does ballan wrasse eat?
A ballan wrasse eats things that are armoured, and it does so with a second set of jaws. The teeth in the mouth grip and pull; the mill that actually breaks shells sits further back, in the throat, as a pharyngeal apparatus of crushing plates. A wrasse takes a mussel or a crab, carries it back, and reduces it.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does common dentex eat?
The dentex is the Mediterranean's answer to a reef predator that hunts like an open-water one, and the diet reflects the double life. It holds over rocky ground and drop-offs, which is where the cephalopod component of the diet comes from — squid, cuttlefish and octopus taken around structure. Then it leaves, moving into open water to hunt shoaling fish, and the anchovy relationship FishingHQ records belongs to that phase. The teeth are the clue to both.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does common sole eat?
A sole feeds in the dark, in the sediment, using a sense organ most fish do not have. The blind underside of the head carries a fringe of sensory papillae — small fleshy projections that detect chemical traces and touch. The fish works head-down over sand and mud, and locates buried worms and small crustaceans through that fringe rather than by sight.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does conger eel eat?
A conger hunts from an address. The fish occupies a lair in a wreck, a reef crevice or under a boulder, leaves it to feed largely after dark, and returns to the same hole — a pattern that makes the animal's distribution a map of available structure rather than of available food. Sight contributes little.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does european eel eat?
The eel is the most extreme case on FishingHQ of a diet that changes completely with life stage, and the stages are separated by thousands of kilometres. Leptocephalus larvae drifting from the Sargasso Sea feed on marine particulate material. Glass eels arriving at the coast are barely feeding at all.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does european plaice eat?
A plaice can be buried and still be watching. The eyes sit on short stalks that can be raised above the sediment surface, so a fish that has covered itself in sand retains a working field of view — an arrangement that makes vision a usable sense for an animal that spends most of its time out of sight. Feeding is bottom-restricted and selective rather than opportunistic.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does european sea bass eat?
Bass hunt turbulence. That is the organising fact, and the three verified prey relationships are best read through it. The fish exploits water that has lost its order — the undertow of a surf table lifting food off the bottom, a tide race where prey cannot hold position, a gully where a receding tide concentrates whatever was on the flat.
3 verified prey relationships.
What does gilthead bream eat?
A gilthead bream can crush an oyster, and the fishery consequences of that are more serious than they sound. The jaws carry rows of rounded molariform teeth backed by a heavy skull, and the resulting bite force is sufficient to break the shells of bivalves and gastropods outright. This is not the pharyngeal mill a wrasse uses; the crushing happens at the front, in the mouth.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does greater amberjack eat?
An amberjack hunts by driving prey against something it cannot swim through, and the two verified relationships are the two kinds of thing it drives. Small shoaling clupeids — sprat and its relatives across the range — are pushed towards the surface or against structure until the shoal loses coherence. Cephalopods, recorded at group level, are taken over and around the deep structure the species holds to, particularly at depth. The hunting is cooperative and fast.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does haddock eat?
Haddock and cod are caught on the same ground and are not doing the same job. The haddock's mouth is small and inferior — set below a projecting snout — and the fish picks prey from and just above the seabed rather than seizing it. That single anatomical difference separates the two species' diets more completely than any behavioural preference would: a haddock cannot take what a cod takes, and does not try. Both verified relationships are benthic and both are recorded at group level: polychaete worms and molluscs.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does ling eat?
Ling occupy structure and let the food come close. The mouth is large, the teeth are sharp and recurved, and the fish is built to seize substantial prey at short range rather than to run it down. The two verified relationships reflect the two halves of what passes within reach: herring, standing for the shoaling fish that move over and around deep structure, and decapod crustaceans taken on and around the rough ground itself.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does pollack eat?
A pollack looks upwards. The fish holds over structure and hunts against the light above it, taking prey that is silhouetted, which is an unusual orientation among the gadoids and the single most useful thing to know about the species. The one verified prey relationship is sandeel, which fits precisely: a slim, silver, mid-water shoaling fish moving above clean ground near reef edges is exactly what an upward-hunting ambush predator is positioned for. FishBase places pollack at a trophic level higher than cod, which is worth noting because it runs against the intuition that the larger and more famous fish must be the more predatory one.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does saithe eat?
Saithe are the gadoid that behaves like a pelagic fish, and both verified relationships describe a stage of that. Smaller saithe feed heavily on planktonic crustaceans — euphausiids and copepods, recorded at group level — in mid water, which is a genuinely different way of making a living from anything a cod does. As the fish grows it becomes piscivorous, and sandeel is the relationship FishingHQ holds for that phase, standing alongside herring and sprat in the wider diet. The transition is why juvenile and adult saithe are found in different places doing different things, and why the inshore shoals of small fish and the offshore shoals of large ones can look like separate species to an angler. Hunting is fast, shoaling and sight-dominant, with the lateral line supporting in low light and at depth.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does atlantic bonito eat?
The bonito is a small tuna that lives at the pace of its prey, and its diet is close to a single-item one for months at a time. Both verified relationships are small shoaling clupeoids: anchovy across the Mediterranean, Black Sea and eastern Atlantic, and sprat where anchovy is scarce. Bonito runs along a coast are, in practice, anchovy movements observed from the shore, and the timing of the fishery in the Bosphorus, the northern Mediterranean and the Iberian Atlantic is set by the forage fish rather than by the calendar. The fish is built for it.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does atlantic bluefin tuna eat?
A bluefin tuna is warm in cold water, and that fact organises its entire feeding ecology. Counter-current heat exchangers allow the fish to keep its muscle, viscera and brain above ambient temperature, which permits sustained high-speed swimming in water far colder than any other bony fish of comparable activity could tolerate. The consequence is a predator that can operate from the Mediterranean to Norwegian and Canadian waters within a single year, and can hunt at depth as well as at the surface. The three verified relationships map onto that range.
3 verified prey relationships.
What does barbel eat?
A barbel feeds with its face in gravel it cannot see into, and the whole animal is arranged around that. The four barbels that give the fish its name carry dense concentrations of taste and touch receptors, and the mouth is underslung and protrusible. The fish works over and into gravel and the downstream edges of weed beds, locating caddis larvae, mayfly nymphs, freshwater shrimp and snails by contact rather than by sight, and it does this as effectively in complete darkness and heavy colour as in clear daylight. Both verified relationships describe that: aquatic insect larvae and molluscs, each recorded at the group level the sources use. Current is the second organising fact.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does chub eat?
The chub is the species on FishingHQ that most clearly changes what it is over a lifetime, and the change is visible in what it eats. A small chub is an invertebrate feeder taking insect larvae from the bed and the drift. A large chub is a predator, taking small fish and crayfish, and it will do so with a decisiveness that surprises anglers who think of the species as a coarse fish. The two verified relationships bracket that transition: aquatic insect larvae for the early phase, freshwater crayfish for the later one.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does common bream eat?
A bream eats with a tube. The mouth extends forwards and downwards into a protrusible funnel, and the fish works nose-down over soft sediment, sucking bloodworm and small invertebrates out of the top layer of silt. That posture explains almost everything else about the species.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does common carp eat?
The interesting thing about carp feeding is not what goes into the mouth but what comes back out of it. A carp takes in a mouthful of silt and organic matter, sorts it internally, and expels what it does not want through the gills and the mouth. The sorting is precise enough to separate a single food item from a mouthful of debris, and it happens fast enough to be effectively continuous while the fish works over the bed. Both verified relationships describe what survives that sorting: aquatic insect larvae, dominated by chironomid larvae in silt, and molluscs — snails and small bivalves crushed with pharyngeal teeth in the throat. The sensory arrangement supports it.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does european perch eat?
Perch cross a threshold. Below roughly 25 cm the diet is mixed and increasingly includes fish fry; above about 35 cm it is close to exclusively piscivorous, and the animal that results hunts differently from the one it was. The three verified relationships capture the transition rather than a single state.
3 verified prey relationships.
What does grayling eat?
The grayling's mouth is set underneath its head, and that settles where the fish feeds. Despite being a salmonid that will rise freely to a surface hatch, the default feeding position is low in the water and frequently on the bed itself. The underslung mouth is built for taking nymphs, larvae and small crustaceans from and just above the gravel, and the fish holds station on the bottom in a way a trout in the same run does not. The single verified relationship — aquatic insect larvae, at group level — is the mainstay, and in the clean, stony, well-oxygenated rivers grayling require it is mayfly, caddis and stonefly larvae that dominate. Vision is the working sense and it is sharp, particularly in the clear low water of winter when the species is most fished for.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does roach eat?
Roach shoal by size, and that fact turns out to be a statement about diet. A shoal of small roach and a shoal of large ones are feeding on different things in different parts of the water column: the small fish take zooplankton and small larvae higher up, the larger ones work insect larvae, molluscs and plant material on and near the bed. The species is omnivorous throughout, but what it is eating depends on which shoal it belongs to, and the shoals do not mix. The single verified relationship is aquatic insect larvae, recorded at group level, and it is the most consistent animal component across sizes and waters. Vision is good and the fish is notably easy to spook in clear shallow water, which sets the species apart from the bottom-rooting cyprinids it shares water with.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does tench eat?
A tench gives itself away by breathing out the bed. The fish roots through the top few centimetres of soft silt for bloodworm, snails and small crustaceans, working blind by touch and taste through the barbels and lips. That disturbance releases gas trapped in the sediment, and the resulting fine pinprick bubbling on the surface is the classic sign of feeding tench — a behavioural signature produced by the mechanics of the feeding rather than by the fish itself. The single verified relationship is aquatic insect larvae at group level, and chironomid larvae dominate it in the silty, weedy, productive stillwaters the species favours. Two physiological facts shape when this happens.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does wels catfish eat?
The wels hunts by feel and by taste in water where nothing can see, and it takes prey that ought to be too large for it. Chemoreception and mechanoreception dominate completely. The long barbels carry dense taste receptors, the lateral line is highly developed, and the fish locates prey in complete darkness and heavy colour without using vision at all.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does brown trout eat?
A trout in a river is running an energy calculation, continuously. The fish holds a feeding station in the current and intercepts what drifts past it, and the position is chosen so that the food delivered exceeds the cost of holding station there. That economics is precise and observable: a trout will not move far for a small item and will move a considerable distance for a large one, and the same fish will abandon a station that stops paying. The two verified relationships are what the drift mostly consists of.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does striped bass eat?
The striped bass is the broadest feeder in this file, and the breadth is the point rather than a failure to be specific. Larvae take zooplankton. Juveniles take small shrimps, crustaceans, worms and insects.
3 verified prey relationships.
What does bluefish eat?
Bluefish feed with a violence that is unusual enough to have its own vocabulary, and the behaviour has genuine biological content rather than being an angler's exaggeration. A feeding school attacks a bait shoal collectively and continues attacking after it has stopped being hungry, killing and abandoning prey. The result — cut fish drifting away from a boil, oil slicks on the surface, birds working the remains — is the most recognisable feeding sign on the American east coast. The two verified relationships are the two principal targets of that.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does red drum eat?
A tailing red drum is a fish that has committed its whole body to reaching something in the sediment, and that posture is the single most informative thing about the species' diet. The mouth is inferior — set beneath a blunt snout — and the fish feeds head-down, rooting in sand and mud for crabs, shrimp and shellfish. In water shallow enough that the fish cannot level out, the tail breaks the surface, which is the behaviour the entire sight fishery on the flats is built on. The crustacean relationship FishingHQ records belongs to that mode.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does black drum eat?
The black drum is the specialist that the red drum is not, and the specialisation is in the throat. Pharyngeal teeth — heavy, flattened crushing plates set behind the mouth — allow the fish to break oysters, clams and mussels outright. Prey is located with chin barbels dragged across the bottom, taken, and crushed.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does atlantic tarpon eat?
A tarpon eats upwards, and its mouth says so before anything else does. The lower jaw projects and the mouth is set at an upward angle, which suits taking prey silhouetted above the fish. Tarpon work bait from beneath, rising through the water column into a shoal, and the feeding takes place against the light rather than along the bottom. The two verified relationships are both dense-shoaling clupeids taken that way — menhaden in coastal water and scaled sardines in the shallow coastal and estuarine habitat the species uses.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does common snook eat?
A snook does not chase. It holds in current beside structure, facing the flow, and inhales what the water brings past it. The mechanism is suction.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does bonefish eat?
The bonefish is built to eat things that are buried and armoured, on a flat where there is nothing to hide behind. Feeding is head-down rooting in sediment for crabs, shrimps, worms and small molluscs, and the prey is crushed with heavy pharyngeal plates rather than bitten. The mouth is inferior and the snout is conical, which is the shape of an animal that works the bottom. Both verified relationships describe that: decapod crustaceans and molluscs, each at group level. The posture produces the fishery.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does gag grouper eat?
A gag grouper's feeding and its escape are the same movement performed twice. The fish holds in a hole, a ledge or a wreck, and takes prey with a sudden suction strike through a large mouth — then returns immediately to cover. The strike is a short, explosive lunge from structure, and the return is automatic.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does northern red snapper eat?
The red snapper is the structure-associated predator that is willing to leave the structure, and that willingness explains both its catchability and its management history. The fish holds over reef, wreck and artificial structure and takes prey from the water column above it as well as from the bottom — rising well off the structure to intercept, which a grouper on the same reef will not do. Both verified relationships are group-level and both are structure-associated: decapod crustaceans, dominant in smaller fish, and cephalopods, taken over and around the reef particularly at night and in deeper water. Fish enter the diet increasingly with size, and large red snapper are substantially piscivorous. The ontogenetic pattern is spatial as well as dietary.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does lake trout eat?
The lake trout is the clearest case on FishingHQ of a fish whose entire life outcome is set by what its lake contains. Where a suitable forage fish is present, lake trout are piscivorous, grow quickly and reach substantial size. Where none is, they feed on invertebrates and plankton and produce the small, slow-growing populations characteristic of infertile northern lakes.
3 verified prey relationships.
What does brook trout eat?
A brook trout's size is a statement about what its water contains, and the two verified relationships mark the two ends of the range. In the small, cold, clean headwater streams the species is most associated with, the diet is aquatic insect larvae taken from the drift, and a mature fish may be a modest length after several years. Those populations are numerous, short-lived and small. Where a forage fish is available — and rainbow smelt is the relationship FishingHQ records — brook trout become piscivorous and reach sizes that look like a different species.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does rainbow trout eat?
The rainbow trout has been moved to every continent except Antarctica, and one consequence is that its diet is a description of wherever it has been put rather than of anywhere in particular. In its stream form the pattern is the salmonid one: a feeding station held in current, drifting invertebrates intercepted, and an energy calculation that decides how far the fish will move for what. The verified relationship — aquatic insect larvae at group level — is the staple of that life. In lakes the fish patrols rather than holds.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does cutthroat trout eat?
The cutthroat is a species that exists as a set of subspecies in separate drainages, and the diet is best read as a common strategy expressed in very different waters. The verified relationship is aquatic insect larvae at group level, and in the cold, clear western streams that hold most cutthroat populations that is the staple: mayfly and stonefly nymphs, caddis larvae, and the terrestrial insects that fall in from the bank during summer. The drift economics applies as it does to any stream salmonid. What separates cutthroat in practice is a reputation for taking surface food more readily than the trout they share water with, which is consistently reported and is not something FishingHQ can point to controlled work on. Some populations diverge substantially.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does chinook salmon eat?
A chinook grows larger than any other Pacific salmon, and the marine diet is where that happens. The two verified relationships are the principal forage fish of the north-eastern Pacific coastal zone: Pacific sand lance, whose abundance chinook condition tracks closely, and northern anchovy, which dominates further south in the California Current. That pair carries an important piece of ocean ecology. Anchovy and sardine abundance in the California Current alternate over decadal regimes, so what a chinook eats off California in one decade is not what it ate in the last, and salmon condition and survival move with those regimes.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does coho salmon eat?
Coho spend less time at sea than chinook and grow faster while there, and the diet reflects a fish making the most of a short marine phase. The verified relationship is Pacific sand lance, the principal forage fish of the north-eastern Pacific nearshore, taken heavily during the marine growth phase. Herring, euphausiids and squid make up much of the rest, and coho feed closer inshore and shallower than chinook on average, which is a genuine difference in where the same kinds of prey are taken. The freshwater juvenile phase is longer than chinook's and is spent in small streams, where young coho are territorial drift feeders on insect larvae — a completely different ecology occupying the first year or two of life, and one these relationships do not describe. Aggression is the behavioural characteristic anglers and biologists both note.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does sockeye salmon eat?
The sockeye is the Pacific salmon that does not eat fish, and that single fact is the whole of what an angler needs to understand about it. The species is a zooplankton specialist throughout life. Long, fine gill rakers strain copepods and other small crustaceans from the water, and this continues at sea where the other Pacific salmon become piscivorous.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does smallmouth bass eat?
Crayfish dominate the smallmouth bass diet across most of its range, and the association is close enough that smallmouth habitat selection is largely crayfish habitat selection. The verified relationship — freshwater crayfish at group level — is the one that matters most by weight in adult fish, and it explains why the species is found over rock, rubble and gravel rather than in the weed and timber a largemouth prefers. The two species overlap constantly and are doing different things: one is hunting a crustacean that lives under stones, the other is engulfing whatever comes past a weed edge. Fish, aquatic insects and terrestrial insects taken at the surface make up the rest, and young smallmouth take plankton and insect larvae before the shift. The feeding mechanism is suction, as in other black basses, but the crayfish emphasis means a great deal of the feeding involves picking prey off and out of the substrate rather than intercepting it in open water. Temperature governs activity as it does in all the black basses, and smallmouth are more cold-tolerant than largemouth, which is part of why they occupy the cooler, faster, rockier waters they do. The species is recorded as cannibalistic, which is normal in the family and is a population control rather than an anomaly..
1 verified prey relationship.
What does spotted bass eat?
The spotted bass sits between the largemouth and the smallmouth in almost every respect, and its diet is where the position is clearest. The verified relationship is freshwater crayfish, taken from rocky ground in the manner of a smallmouth, and it is the principal item across much of the range. Fish and insects supplement it. What separates the species is depth and current.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does blue catfish eat?
The blue catfish is a large, mobile, current-oriented feeder, and its principal food source is one that dies in large numbers on a schedule. The verified relationship is gizzard shad, the dominant forage fish across the reservoir and large-river systems the species occupies. Shad are taken alive, and they are also taken dead in quantity: winter cold snaps kill gizzard shad in large numbers, and the resulting die-offs are a predictable and substantial feeding event that blue catfish exploit directly. That willingness to take dead prey is the practically important difference from the flathead catfish sharing the same water, which takes live fish almost exclusively. The sensory arrangement supports it.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does flathead catfish eat?
The flathead catfish will not eat anything that is dead, and among the large American catfish that is a genuinely unusual position. Adults are almost exclusively piscivorous and take live fish and crayfish. Dead or prepared food is largely refused — a fact so consistent that it defines the fishery and separates it completely from blue and channel catfish angling on the same water. The verified relationship is gizzard shad, the principal forage fish across most of the range, taken alive. The behaviour is nocturnal and lair-based.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does channel catfish eat?
The channel catfish is the omnivore of the three large American catfish, and its diet is the broadest and the least specialised of the three. The verified relationship is aquatic insect larvae at group level, and it reflects the fact that invertebrates dominate the diet for much of the fish's life. Small fish, crayfish, molluscs, plant material and carrion all feature, and the balance shifts towards fish as the animal grows without ever becoming exclusive. The sensory arrangement is the family's and it is remarkable.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does black crappie eat?
The black crappie feeds in open water rather than on the bottom, and that is what separates it from most of the panfish it is grouped with. The species suspends over structure rather than sitting on it, and feeds upwards and outwards on small fish and invertebrates in the water column. Young-of-year gizzard shad — the verified relationship — are a principal item through the warmer months, and the arrival of a strong shad year class changes crappie growth for a season. The second verified relationship is aquatic insect larvae, which dominate in smaller fish and remain significant in adults through the colder months when shad are less available. The mouth is large for the size of the fish but the tissue around it is thin and delicate, which is a physical characteristic with consequences for how the fish is handled rather than for what it eats. Feeding is strongly light-linked with peaks at dawn and dusk, and the species is notably active in cold water — crappie remain catchable through winter when many warm-water species have effectively stopped, which is why they support a substantial ice fishery at the northern edge of the range. The suspension habit is the most useful single fact: a crappie shoal has a depth, and that depth is more informative than its horizontal position..
2 verified prey relationships.
What does bluegill eat?
A bluegill's mouth is the smallest thing about it in proportion, and it is the fact that governs the whole diet. The mouth is small and adapted to picking rather than engulfing. Everything the fish eats has to pass through that constraint, so the diet is made of items an angler would struggle to see: midge and mayfly larvae, tiny crustaceans, snails, drifting zooplankton, and fish eggs where it can reach them.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does yellow perch eat?
Yellow perch feed by sight in daylight and stop when the light goes, and the significance of that is best seen from the perspective of the fish that eats them. Walleye — a verified predator of yellow perch on FishingHQ — begin hunting exactly when perch stop. The perch retreat as light falls; the walleye's reflective tapetum gives it the advantage in precisely those conditions.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does barramundi eat?
A barramundi does not chase things. It waits beside structure and inhales. The mouth is large and protrusible, and opening it suddenly generates enough suction to draw prey in from a short distance — a mechanism that requires no speed advantage over the prey at all.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does dusky flathead eat?
A dusky flathead spends most of its life buried, looking up. The body is dorsoventrally flattened, the eyes are set on top of the head, and the fish lies partly or wholly covered in sand or mud with only the eyes exposed. Prey passing overhead is taken with an upward lunge — a single explosive movement from a standing start. Every feature of the animal serves that one action.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does australian bass eat?
The Australian bass is a small ambush predator that will take food off the surface, and the combination is what gives the species its reputation. The fish holds beside cover in coastal rivers and strikes at prey passing above or beside it. The two verified relationships describe both halves of what passes: decapod crustaceans — freshwater prawns and shrimps, which are the staple in most systems — and aquatic insect larvae, alongside the terrestrial insects that fall in from overhanging vegetation. That surface component is the unusual part.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does murray cod eat?
The Murray cod is Australia's largest freshwater fish and it eats essentially anything it can fit in its mouth, which at full size is a considerable range. The adult diet is limited by gape and by very little else. Invertebrates, fish and frogs make up the bulk of it, and the recorded list extends to reptiles, waterbirds and small mammals taken from the surface.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does golden perch eat?
The golden perch is an active feeder rather than a pure ambusher, which separates it from the Murray cod it shares water with. The fish moves and searches, taking shrimp, yabbies and other crustaceans, aquatic insects and small fish. The verified relationship is freshwater crayfish, which is the principal item by weight across the Murray-Darling system. What distinguishes the species biologically is the migration.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does australasian snapper eat?
The Australasian snapper is equipped to eat things that are armoured, and the dentition is where the diet begins. The jaws carry heavy crushing teeth, and the fish takes crabs, shrimps, shellfish, sea urchins and starfish from broken and shell ground, breaking them rather than swallowing them whole. The verified crustacean relationship describes the dominant part of that, and it is recorded at group level because the sources record crushed remains at group level. The second verified relationship is yellowtail scad, standing for the small shoaling fish that larger snapper take.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does yellowtail kingfish eat?
Kingfish hunt in packs and use structure as a wall. The fish work in groups at speed around reef, pinnacles and current lines, driving bait shoals against the structure or against the surface until the shoal loses coherence. It is a cooperative, high-speed strategy that has more in common with the amberjacks it is related to than with anything else in Australasian waters. The two verified relationships are the two principal targets.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does kahawai eat?
Kahawai feed on krill more often than most anglers expect, and that fact explains the fishery's most frustrating situation. The species takes fish and pelagic crustaceans, and the krill component is substantial: the verified relationship to euphausiids and planktonic crustaceans is recorded at group level and describes a real and frequent feeding mode rather than a marginal one. Small individuals under about ten centimetres take predominantly copepods. The second verified relationship is pilchard, standing for the small shoaling fish taken in the other mode. The two modes look identical from a distance.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does dusky kob eat?
The dusky kob feeds in water that has been stirred up, and it is one of the few species on FishingHQ for which rough conditions are a feeding cue rather than an obstacle. FishBase records the species at a trophic level of about 4.5, which places it firmly among the higher predators. Fish and crustaceans are taken across three quite different environments — the surf zone, the deeper estuary channels and nearshore ground — and the feeding is weighted heavily towards darkness and towards discoloured water after a sea has been running. The two verified relationships describe both components.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does japanese sea bass eat?
The Japanese sea bass is a fish that has made a living out of artificial lighting. It holds in the dark water at the edge of a lit area — harbour lights, bridge lights, the shadow line cast by any structure over water — and takes prey silhouetted against the illumination. The fish is in the dark; the prey is in the light; the edge between them is the feeding station.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does nile perch eat?
The Nile perch's diet cannot be described honestly without describing what it did to a lake. The species is a dominant piscivore with no prey specialisation whatever. It eats the fish that happen to be in front of it, its own juveniles included, and smaller individuals add crustaceans and insects to that.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does golden dorado eat?
The golden dorado is a predator whose entire distribution is an answer to the question of where one prey species is. Sábalo — a large, migratory, detritus-feeding characiform — make up the majority of fish biomass in parts of the Paraná basin, and they are the dorado's principal prey. The verified relationship is to that species specifically, which is unusual precision for a tropical freshwater predator and reflects how dominant the relationship is. Sábalo undertake long upstream spawning migrations timed to rising water, and dorado distribution, timing and concentration follow them.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does golden mahseer eat?
The golden mahseer is a very large cyprinid, and cyprinids are omnivores — which produces a fish of considerable size with a diet nothing like that of a predator of the same length. Adults take fish, zooplankton, dipteran larvae and plant matter. Juveniles subsist on plankton, and fingerlings feed mainly on algae.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does great barracuda eat?
A barracuda cuts its prey in half and comes back for the pieces. The dentition is the reason: large, blade-like teeth set in a long jaw, adapted to shearing rather than to holding. The strike is made from a stationary or slowly drifting position and is extremely fast over a short distance — the fish is not a pursuit predator, it is a stationary object that becomes very fast for one second. The verified relationship is ballyhoo, the surface-schooling halfbeak of the tropical western Atlantic, and it is a good representative of what the species takes: slim, silver, surface-oriented shoaling fish. That prey preference explains where barracuda hold — over reef edges, along drop-offs and near the surface, where such fish pass — and it explains the species' habit of following boats and divers, which is opportunism rather than aggression. Cephalopods and shrimps feature in the diet too. The ciguatera association belongs on this page because it is a direct consequence of the diet.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does sailfish eat?
The sail is a hunting tool, and the diet is what it is used to obtain. Sailfish hunt cooperatively, working in groups to separate individuals from a bait shoal. The dorsal fin is raised during the attack, which is thought to make the fish appear larger and to help herd and confuse prey, and the bill is used to slash and stun rather than to spear.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does mahi-mahi eat?
The dolphinfish lives fast and eats almost anything, and the two facts are connected. Growth is among the fastest of any bony fish — a mahi-mahi may reach a metre within a year — and it lives only four or five years. Sustaining that requires eating continuously and without discrimination, and the diet reflects it: almost all forms of small fish, zooplankton, crustaceans and squid. The two verified relationships are the items that matter most in the tropical western Atlantic.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does yellowfin tuna eat?
A yellowfin tuna feeds across a greater vertical range than almost any fish on FishingHQ, and it does so within a single day. The species hunts visually at speed near the surface and also descends to considerable depth, taking fish, crustaceans and squid throughout. The two verified relationships mark the range: cephalopods at group level, taken deep and at night when squid rise through the water column, and euphausiids and planktonic crustaceans, which form a measurable part of the diet and produce one of the fishery's characteristic frustrations. A yellowfin school feeding on small crustacean swarms is visibly active and notoriously difficult to interest in anything of a size an angler can present — the same problem the horse mackerel and kahawai pages describe, at a much larger scale. Schooling is by size, in single-species or mixed groups, and larger fish frequently associate with dolphins.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does narrow-barred spanish mackerel eat?
This is a fish built entirely for one short, fast attack, and the dentition tells you what happens at the end of it. The teeth are blade-like and shear rather than hold, so prey is frequently cut rather than swallowed whole. The fish hunts at speed in open water and around reef edges and current lines, striking small schooling fish and squid from below and behind. The two verified relationships are the two staples.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does giant trevally eat?
The giant trevally is an apex inshore predator that hunts in the top few metres of water and will attack prey at the surface with a violence that has few parallels. It takes fish, cephalopods and crustaceans, hunting alone and in groups, and driving prey against reef, structure and the surface. It feeds by day and at night.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does bluefin trevally eat?
The bluefin trevally hunts with other species, and that is the most interesting thing about how it feeds. It forms cooperative hunting associations — following octopus and moray eels over reef and taking prey flushed out of holes and crevices by them. The trevally does not do the flushing; it positions itself to intercept what escapes.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does flathead grey mullet eat?
Almost every angler who has failed to catch a mullet has failed for the same reason, and it is on this page rather than in a tackle box. The flathead grey mullet is a detritivore. It feeds on decomposing organic matter, microalgae and the organic film coating sediment surfaces, ingesting sand and mud along with the food and grinding the mixture in a muscular, gizzard-like portion of the stomach.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does thick-lipped grey mullet eat?
This is a grazing animal, and the whole of its reputation among anglers follows from that one word. Adults work surfaces: benthic diatoms, epiphytic algae growing on weed, rock and harbour walls, and the small invertebrates and detritus mixed into that film. The lips that give the species its name are thickened and are part of the apparatus for scraping it.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does grass carp eat?
A grass carp eats plants, in quantities that are difficult to believe until a lake has been stripped by a handful of them. The adult is almost exclusively herbivorous, consuming submerged and emergent aquatic vegetation and taking terrestrial plant material that falls onto the water. The single verified relationship is aquatic plants, recorded as a food category and joined with `consumes` rather than `preys_on`, because there is no predation here at any stage of the adult's life. The striking part is the volume, and it has a mechanical explanation.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does african tigerfish eat?
The African tigerfish stops eating anything but fish at a size small enough to hold in one hand. The shift is unusually sharp. Smaller individuals take shrimp and insects alongside fish; above roughly ninety to a hundred millimetres they are exclusive fish feeders, and they remain so for the rest of a life that reaches several kilograms.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does speckled peacock bass eat?
A peacock bass is a large, powerful predator that spends its life eating very small fish, and the mismatch is the most useful thing to know about it. The recorded diet is dominated by characids under about ten centimetres — small silver shoaling fish of the kind that occur in enormous numbers throughout the Amazon and Orinoco systems. The verified relationship is to characiform fishes, at order level, because the evidence identifies the prey by family and size rather than by species and FishingHQ holds none of those characids as records. That narrowness is unusual.
1 verified prey relationship.
What does dab eat?
A dab hunts by lying still and taking what crosses it, and almost everything it takes is small, slow and at least partly buried. The verified relationships are three groups: polychaete worms, thin-shelled bivalve and gastropod molluscs, and small decapod crustaceans. All three are creatures of clean sand and fine gravel, and none of them is chased.
3 verified prey relationships.
What does european flounder eat?
The flounder eats whatever the estuary is producing, and the estuary produces different things in different places and months. That variability is the single most important thing about this diet. Three groups carry verified relationships: polychaete worms, decapod crustaceans and small bivalve and gastropod molluscs.
3 verified prey relationships.
What does black seabream eat?
A black bream browses. It does not hunt, and almost every practical difficulty in catching one follows from that. The three verified relationships are decapod crustaceans, polychaete worms and small bivalve and gastropod molluscs, and to those should be added hydroids, bryozoans and the general weed-associated growth that coats reef, wreck and coarse ground.
3 verified prey relationships.
What does grey gurnard eat?
The grey gurnard has a feeding apparatus that nothing else on its ground possesses, and it is worth describing before the diet itself. The three lowest rays of each pectoral fin are free of the webbing and act as independent, mobile, finger-like appendages carrying both touch and chemical receptors. The fish props on them, moves them ahead of itself over the seabed, and detects buried prey by feel and by taste before it can see anything.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does tub gurnard eat?
The tub gurnard has the same apparatus as every gurnard and uses a larger share of its diet differently, and that difference is what separates the two British species in practice. The free finger-like pectoral rays are present and fully functional: the fish props on them, probes the sediment, and detects buried crustaceans and worms by touch and taste. Decapod crustaceans carry a verified relationship on exactly that basis. But a substantially larger proportion of the tub gurnard's diet is fish, and it is taken by chasing and ambushing rather than by probing.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does john dory eat?
The John Dory is almost entirely piscivorous, and its whole body is a solution to one problem: how does a fish with no speed catch fish that have some. The answer is geometry rather than power. The dory is compressed almost to the thickness of a plate, and it approaches prey HEAD-ON, along the axis where that thinness makes it very nearly invisible — a vertical line with two eyes.
2 verified prey relationships.
What does vendace eat?
A vendace eats one thing, and the anatomy for it is visible from outside. IT IS A SPECIALIST ZOOPLANKTON FEEDER. The diet is dominated by small planktonic crustaceans — copepods and cladocerans, of which the water flea Daphnia is the best-known — taken from open water rather than picked off a bottom or a plant. THE MECHANISM IS THE GILL RAKERS.
1 verified prey relationship.
These pages exist for the species where FishingHQ genuinely knows something about feeding that the fish’s own page cannot express — which means, in practice, the species for which there is a verified predation relationship. For a long time there were five, because a prey claim has to identify the prey and be evidenced, and most prey had no page of their own to be identified against. Adding them is what made the rest of these possible.
The list is still shorter than the number of fish FishingHQ covers, and it always will be. A species with no verified prey relationship gets no page here rather than a page that guesses.