Skipper Meggs Amidships

Ever since I saw Sarah in a Toga at a party years ago I’ve been interested in her fishing namesake.

The Scleropages Leichardti (Italian resident in Balmain area?), or Saratoga as it is more commonly called, hails from regions as diverse as Africa, Asia, South America, New Guinea and of course northern Australia.

Believe it or not a member of its family grows to an enormous fifteen feet in South America but locally they reach lengths to 90cm and can weigh in at 17kg.

Saratoga are aggressive territorial freshwater fish who enjoy their own company and not much of anyone elses, including fish of their own kind.

The breeding season for Saratoga happens around late winter through to spring and fish around 4 years of age or 45-50cm in length are considered to be mature enough to take part in the process.

Interestingly the only time other saratoga leave their own kind alone is if they are breeding females.

Anyway, the female will produce between 70-200 eggs (who counts these things?) each about 10mm round. The funny thing is the fish carries these eggs around in its mouth until they hatch and will keep the young there for up to 8 weeks!

During this time the female will not eat anything until the kids are off her hands (or more to the point out of her mouth).

Fingerlings go off on their own once they are between 100-150mm in length. They then take up residency in a pool of their own and will grow to a size of 25cm in their first year.

You can tell they are surface feeding fish as their eyes are on the top of their head and they love snags, overhanging trees or bushes and like to be out of the prevailing winds -probably so they can see opportunities for quick snacks.

By the way, they taste terrible and have a tendancy to stink (you probably would too if you had to carry the kids around in your mouth) so even though there’s a bag limit of one per fisherman it’s probably best to release them once caught.

Sea you later,

Skipper Meggs

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 1:00 am and is filed under Fish Life Cycle Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.