Gilled glutton leaves anglers scratching their heads after a pike was found dead with a zander — a fish of similar size — jammed in its mouth in the Netherlands.
While in his boat doing some work by the jetty near his home, Rene Spaargaren, from Almere near Amsterdam, noticed a dead fish with a rather large tail fin protruding out of its mouth. So, as any curious fisherman would do, he grabbed a boat hook and pulled the anomaly aboard.
“It was clear that the pike had bitten off more than it could chew — or swallow, rather,” he told BBC News.
British angling expert Charles Jardine called this a “really unusual” event. Jardine queried rather befuddled, “What on Earth possessed the pike to take on prey that size? Gluttony just killed that fish.” Jardine expanded on the “unusual” element of this particular circumstance by explaining that the zander — also know as the “pike-perch” due to its similarities with two other fish — wasn’t a typical target for a pike. “A pike is not an alligator or a python — it will not accommodate similar-sized food,” he told the BBC. Ultimately, what secured this gilled glutton’s demise was the arrangement of its teeth, “because the teeth on a pike go backward, it would have been unable to release its grip on the zander. It was a death grip for the fish.” Irony is a reality even aquatic creatures find incircumnavigable.
Mr Jardine, who champions angling among schoolchildren for the Countryside Alliance Foundation, added: “I have seen Victorian pictures of such things, done with artistic license, but nobody gave them much credence.”
Spaargaren tossed the two fish back in the water after making a few calculations — of course — to gauge the size of the two specimens. The pike measured about 1 m. (3.2 ft.) long and the zander about 75 cm. (2ft 5 in.), with a combined weight of about 15 kilos (33 lbs.).
Mr. Spaargaren reported his find to the Dutch nature conservation news website Natuurbericht, which published the story.
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