Fish biting Pelican Lake swimmers

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/06/2023 (895 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The fish were biting in Pelican Lake on Sunday afternoon, says a Westman father of three — but not in the way he and his kids wanted.

Two of Shane LaPierre’s kids were bitten by fish while they were swimming at Terry Fox Park in Ninette.

“The kids weren’t in the water for long when my eight-year-old daughter Jordan started screaming, saying, ‘I just got bit,’ and she came running out of the water. And then right after that, my 16-year-old son Chevy got bit the first time, and then towards the end of the day, he got bit again,” said LaPierre.

Kristi Connors had much the same experience with her eight-year-old daughter Seraphim at the same location last summer.

“My daughter and her cousin are water babies,” said Connors. “They have been since the day they were born, so they’re always in the water. The cousin was bitten on her toe, which was very painful, and my daughter got bit on her leg. When she did, she said, ‘ouch, that hurt.’”

The biting fish is a black bullhead catfish, one of six species of North American freshwater catfish that thrives in Manitoba. It is tolerant and able to live in muddy lakes that have warm temperatures, with almost no competition from other fish. It reproduces from April to June, when females lay up to 5,000 eggs in a scooped-out hole on a shallow part of the lake’s floor called a nest site. The males fertilize the eggs and then watch over them, but both parents tend to the young, called fry, for the first few weeks once they hatch.

When something or someone gets near the bullhead’s nest, the fish aggressively protects it, said Trevor Maguire, chairperson of the Pelican Lake Healthy Lake Committee.

“The are spawning their eggs,” said Maguire. “I don’t know why they’re doing it at the beach because that’s not a normal habitat for them, but some of them are. But bullheads will protect their eggs, so as the kids are running through the water, the fish is interpreting it as a predator and biting.”

The bites on LaPierre’s son’s leg drew a bit of blood, he said, and added that they hurt for hours afterwards, which was confirmed by Connors’ daughter’s experience — her bite mark was still visible 24 hours later. Bullheads have great built-in defence mechanisms, cautioned Maguire, including a sharp spine on their backs and on either side of their gills, as well as tiny sharp teeth.

“The bullhead has fine, little needle-like teeth and a big mouth. That’s why when the bites were happening last year for the first time, everybody thought it looked like a human bite, but no,” said Maguire.

“Plus, the little teeth are sloped back, so with the kids’ legs, the fish grabs before it lets go.”

The focus of Pelican Lake Healthy Lake Committee is water stewardship, and volunteers have been aerating the lake to enhance the water quality by moving oxygen to deeper water, said Maguire.

“We’re introducing air at the bottom, and we’re moving all that cold water from the bottom up to the top. And in replacement, the warm water has to move down with oxygen and nutrients, and all the bacteria living down there.

“So, instead of the top three feet of the lake being really productive, we’re taking all 10 feet and making that productive,” said Maguire.

That could be one of the reasons why, he added, that the overall fish populations have been getting healthier and increasing over the last several years.

In a recent fish derby held on Pelican Lake during the first weekend of June, Maguire said fishermen were catching “massive walleye like we’ve never seen, several that were 28 and 31 inches long — just monsters.”

While there have been no official fish counts to measure whether the bullhead has multiplied in Pelican Lake, there have been numerous reports to support the theory that they’re increasing, said Maxime LeGal, regional fisheries manager with Manitoba Fisheries.

Bullhead sightings in Pelican Lake have increased from residents, fishermen and swimmers — as well as the ongoing project to remove the common carp, which is an invasive fish. There have been “high numbers of bullheads” caught in those nets.

And as the bullhead population expands, said LeGal, the fish will need new areas to spawn.

“The higher the population, the further and further that these fish are going to get pushed, and they’re competing for space against other bullheads so, they’re pushing themselves to every end of the lake,” said LeGal.

Connors said her daughter had no lasting effects from being bitten and was back in the water the very next day.

“Cautiously, we try to stay away from the shallow water and now with our boat, we can swim in the middle of the lake.”

LaPierre and his kids will be back.

“And once they get brave enough, they can still go swimming, but I wonder if we’ll start taking our fishing rods, to try to get the fish to bite on something else,” he said with a chuckle.

» mmcdougall@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @enviromichele