Apr
03
2010
If a fish hook is painful for the fish, why then have I so often witnessed?
SCE2AUX asked:
…a fish biting on the bait, then swimming calmly as if nothing had happened – until it reaches the end of the slack in the line. I’ve seen this happen many times in the clear waters of the Florida Keys with 6-12 inch grunts and snappers.
I’ve seen some good answers here. I asked this question in the conservation section as well. If you go there, you’ll see that they had some excellent ideas, as I expected.
…a fish biting on the bait, then swimming calmly as if nothing had happened – until it reaches the end of the slack in the line. I’ve seen this happen many times in the clear waters of the Florida Keys with 6-12 inch grunts and snappers.
I’ve seen some good answers here. I asked this question in the conservation section as well. If you go there, you’ll see that they had some excellent ideas, as I expected.
Related posts:
5 Comments
Other Links to this Post
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
By Backwater Charlie, April 5, 2010 @ 5:00 pm
SCE2AUX,
See fish DON’T know they’re hooked until they feel the tension on the line. That proves that fish have hardly any nerves in their mouths. While the lines slack, the fish don’t feel a thing. Then when the line becomes tight they feel that something is in their mouth’s, and they going into a dramatic shock. That is why they fight when hooked. And that’s why they don’t fight when they’re hooked on slack line.
By The Wormist, April 8, 2010 @ 2:42 pm
nobody here ever said hooks were painful for fish. l sure didn’t.
By psychoninja911, April 10, 2010 @ 2:59 pm
I was told crawfish have no feeling… If you stick them in boiling water, they’re supposed to act normal… Same with lobsters. I researched this myself and only found 1 result that said most shellfish don’t have a nervous system.
Maybe fish don’t? Actually. I think they do. The lateral line is a feeling… The fish can feel with it… Detect movement. Isn’t that just like a nerve?
But on that note, I’ve seen fish come up for food to the surface of water, I can gently touch their face… But if I grab their lip, flick them… something that changes their movement sort of – they’ll flip out and take off.
Carp are one fish that feel lines. Common carp at least. They can **** bait in, if they feel a line, they can spit the bait back out and it’s not unlikely for them to leave the bait alone seeing how they got a weird feeling in their mouth. But carp are cowards of the seas (not seas, lakes). Many other fish don’t care about line size and will just gobble it up – as someone else said – won’t flip out till they feel tension holding them back, or pulling them in the opposite direction.
ALSO, think that the hook might not have penetrated the fishes mouth till their is tension in the line… Or until you set the hook, you know?
I can rest the pointy part of a sharp hook on my finger without it penetrating my skin, but as soon as there’s tension in the line, I’ll feel the point stabbing into my skin.
You with me?
Hope I helped. There’s a few reasons why they don’t spaz instantly probably…
By Peter_AZ, April 13, 2010 @ 3:07 am
Backwater Charlie has it right — a fighting fish is simply responding to the pulling of the fishing line. Just like a fish hanging on a hook out of water is flipping because it’s out of the water, not because of any pain. Fish don’t feel (or more precisely, react to) pain the way we understand it.
A number of years ago I was fishing for lingcod. Lingcod are ferocious deep water predators which commonly grab onto a smaller fish you’ve hooked, and hold on as you wind it a couple hundred feet up to the surface. If you’re quick with a gaff, you can land a nice fish which has never actually been hooked.
Anyway, on this day a guy near me hooked a small rockfish, then he felt it get heavy as the bigger fish clamped on. So he carefully wound the hitchhiking lingcod to the surface, where the deckhand tried to gaff the fish, but only succeeded in ripping the lingcod’s guts out as it thrashed and let go of the smaller fish. Once off the gaff, it started to swim back down, intestines and blood trailing. The angler dropped the rockfish back down about ten feet, right in front of the lingcod’s face, and it just grabbed on again. This time the deckhand did a better job gaffing the fish, and he got a ten pound, pre-gutted lingcod.
Is that the reaction of a fish feeling pain? No, the instinct to eat was stronger than whatever pain this fish was feeling.
By christine v, April 15, 2010 @ 12:07 am
A fish can not feel the hook in its lip. A fishes lip is all cartlidge and no sensitive tissue.