A 112-KILOGRAM louvar was weighed in at Bermagui Bait & Tackle late last month, a creature of the deep that many of us had not heard of let alone witnessed first hand.
More amazingly the fish took a lure being trolled for marlin.
Staff would have liked to have moulded this fish but it was off the gantry and taken away by the successful anglers before that option was discussed.
A fish that grows to 150kg and 2m long and spends its entire life in the open sea is also known as the Loo, Luvaru and Silver King.
It is the only species in the family Luvaridae. To the naked eye it appears somewhat like an opah crossed with a tuna of sorts. The fish is bright silver with orange fins.
The fish is rarely seen by recreational and commercial fishermen alike, it has been recorded over time in both northern and southern waters off the NSW coastline.
A fish that appears more common in Mediterranean waters and perhaps the southern Californian coastline, it has from time to time been washed ashore in England.
Considering louvar have a diet that consists mainly of jellyfish or other macro-plankton it is certainly a rare occurrence to see one caught on a lure whilst trolling our offshore waters.
This is a true open-ocean, mid-water species that spends most of its time well away from land.
Its bright pink/orange colouration is similar to other strange fishes of this twilight world such as the oarfish and the opah, which strongly suggests that it dwells in relatively deep water where orange and pink appear black or grey, helping such fish to merge with the shadowy background.
Global records of louvar are quite scattered, but piecing together information from many sources shows that they are probably most common in the Mediterranean, followed by the Pacific coast of the USA, between southern California and Oregon. Occasional specimens have been netted or washed up in England. Closer to home, adult fish have been washed up or caught along the entire New South Wales coast. Of six records in the archives of the Australian Museum, five were caught or washed up in the 1990s.
One louvar caught off Southwest Rocks in 1939 appears to have been the largest so far recorded from Australia.
This particular fish was referred to by Arthur Parrott in Sea Angler's Fishes of Australia (1959), who gives its weight as 102kg (225lb) and length at 193cm. Parrott also mentions that the first record of a louvar in Australia was a specimen washed ashore at Bermagui in August 1901, but does not give its size.
Prior to this 112kg specimen landed here in May the most recent local louvar to make the news was a specimen measuring 1.8m and estimated at 70-90kg, which was washed up on a beach near Eden, NSW, in October 2006.
The only other louvar to our knowledge taken on a marlin lure is the one caught in November 1997 off Shoalhaven, NSW, by an angler.
The fish weighed in at 80kg, a cast of that fish still hangs in the Greenwell Point Hotel.
The only other rod-and-reel capture of a louvar was a 50kg specimen caught by a gamefish angler in 1995 off Baja, California, on the same day that he landed a striped marlin.
As a magazine article noted at the time: “To catch a louvar on hook and line is truly a rare experience.”
Louvar were long thought to be related to the tunas, primarily on the basis of their tuna-like tail and narrow tail wrist with its prominent lateral keels.
However, more recent studies of juvenile and larval specimens clearly indicate that the most likely close relatives of the louvar are, in fact, the surgeon fishes – much smaller, reef-dwelling fish equipped not with keels, but razor sharp ‘blades’ on their tail wrist.
This is particularly interesting since one of the other large oceanic fish to be covered in a future ‘Creatures of the Deep’, the huge sunfish, has been found to be very closely related to the humble toad fish.
Two cases of small, inshore fishes with mighty sea-going cousins.
So, given we now have a 112kg fish landed here on rod & reel and a 1901 reporting of such a fish being washed ashore on local beaches, it could be said Bermagui is the Louvar hotspot of the world but please don’t expect a capture to occur again any time soon.
I would like to note a special thanks to Tim Simpson, the editor of Blue Water magazine, for assisting with the information above.
Scotty, Bermagui Bait and Tackle
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