Fish bites: Mud crabs give suspect seafood vendor a nasty nip

According to the NSW Department of Primary Industries, officers pulled up at the van and ran a check of all the seafood that was being sold. Four cooked mud crabs found in a tub couldn’t be accounted for.

According to the officers, it appears the mud crabs were caught on a recreational licence and then sold via the van – a practice that is illegal in the state. It was also found the person selling the crabs did not have a commercial fishing licence or other authority that would have allied him to catch and sell the crabs.

Anyone caught selling recreationally caught fish is liable for fines of up to $110,000. The department said the person selling the crabs was slapped with an undisclosed number of penalty notices relating to the crabs.

The South Australian Department of Primary Industries and Regions has released a handy video on handling barotrauma in deep-water fish such as snapper.

“Baro” as it is colloquially known is an injury to the fish caused by internal gases that expand when they go from the high pressure of deep water to the low pressure of your fishing net.

It primarily affects bottom-dwelling species such as snapper, blue groper, mulloway and samson fish, and generally from water depths greater than 10 metres.

It also has a handy explainer of how to use release weights to quickly return a fish to the right depth, helping to minimise harm.

Macquarie perch is now a protected species in Victoria after the last two waterways to permit their take were closed off.

The decision to ban recreational fishers from taking Maccas, as they're known, was made by the Victorian Fisheries Authority in an attempt to give the wild populations of the fish the best chance of re-establishing the species.

It means Dartmouth Dam in the north-east corner of the state and the Upper Coloban Reservoir in the Macedon Ranges are now catch-and-release fisheries for the species.

The move comes after the VFA struggled to reliably build a captive breeding program for the native fish.

The Macquarie perch is still regarded as endangered.

Occasionally we see something online that is truly impressive.

Cooktown-based Ben Blunderfield posted this video to social media showing him having a crack at fishing with a whole chook as bait.

The surprising thing is you only need to spend about a minute watching this video to go from the chook hitting the water to Blunderfield landing what many of us would regard as a trophy-size fish.