Bluefish Pomatomus salatrix

The Fish

Biology

The bluefish is the only member of the family Pomatomidae. It's range is extensive: the east coast of the United States from Maine south to Argentina. Very large fish can be found off the coast of west Africa, Portugal, and the Azore Islands. It is common throughout the Mediterranean, the eastern Indian Ocean, southern Australia and New Zealand.

Habits

The bluefish arrives in Cape waters around the first or second week of May. They remain in the area throughout the summer and fall, departing in mid-October, usually after a strong northeaster. They eat anything, including menhaden (pogies), eels, sand eels, squid, and have even been blamed for attacks on swimmers during their famed feeding "blitzes."

Bluefish are an extremely cyclical species. Having had little commercial interest in the past, their periodic disappearances are a mystery. History shows a plentiful period from 1850 to 1875 with the fish ranging as far north as Nova Scotia. Four years later and the fish was rare in Maine, not to return for a hundred years. Bluefish made their return to the Cape and the Islands in the 1960s and now appear to be on the wane, with the fish the past two years becoming more scarce. Professor Spencer F. Baird wrote in 1874 in the report of the United States Commission on Fish and Fisheries:

"There is no parallel in the point of destructiveness to the bluefish among the marine species on our coast, whatever may be the case among some of the carnivorous fish of the South American waters. The bluefish has been likened to an animated chopping machine, the business of which to cut to pieces and otherwise destroy as many fish as possible in a given space of time. All writers are unanimous in regard to the destructiveness of bluefish. Going in large schools, in pursuit of fish not much inferior to themselves in size, they move along like a pack of hungry wolves, destroying everything before them. Their trail is marked by fragments of fish and by the stain of blood in the sea as, where the fish is too large to be swallowed entire, the hinder portion will be bitten off and the anterior part allowed to float away or sink. It is even maintained with great earnestness that such is the gluttony of the fish that, when the stomach becomes full, the contents are disgorged and then again filled."

Records

The world record on a rod and reel is 31 pounds, 12 ounces, caught at Hatteras Inlet, North Carolina in 1972 by James Hussey. On the Cape, a large fish is anything over 12 pounds. Occasionally, a trophy weighing twenty pounds or more is caught, usually in the fall by bait fishermen livelining menhaden.