Tigerfish! Traditional and Sport Fishing on the Niger River in Mali, West Africa

SPORT FISHING

I rode my bike across the floodplain as soon as the river had dropped enough.  I didn’t feel so dumb in making THAT decision...

Since this was my first fishing effort on the Niger River, I just headed directly to the closest accessible reach.  I ended up at a spot above a mid-channel island.  The water was a little bit slower and deeper than it was just upstream and downstream, but it didn’t look that great. 

Still, I’m a California boy, so what do I know?  I figured I should just cast and let Africa teach me what a good spot is...

So I tied on my favorite when-in-doubt lure – a chartreuse-sparkle curly-tail grub – and winged it out there as far as I could.  It landed in three or four feet of water flowing over rippled sand.  I let it sink and then bumped it along the bottom as it drifted in an arc downstream.

The first bite was distinct – a nice peck-peck in the rod handle.  I set the hook and the fish felt heavy on my light tackle, but there wasn’t much of a fight.  This fish was not freaking out.  Sometimes that’s the first clue that you’ve hooked a big fish.

But where I come from, we always considered it bad luck to catch a fish on the first cast.  And not only was this my first cast of the day, it was my first cast on an entire continent!  I respect this superstition as nothing more than a fun tradition, which is good because I was a little bit afraid of hippos and crocodiles at the time.  But this fish on my line made my newbie-self forget about potential dangers for a few minutes.

The fish continued to trace the original arc of the jig downstream and toward shore.  I gained line easily though, and wondered whether I’d hooked something other than a fish.  It reminded me of accidentally hooking a Dungeness crab in the ocean back home. 

Then when I got this mysterious thing in close enough to see, I thought it must be a child’s toy ball.  But then I thought it must be some kind of turtle – but I thought this only briefly because I went back to thinking it was a water-logged bouncy ball again. 

The dang thing really looked like a ball.  It was white with yellow and dark brown stripes.  And it was about the size of a softball.  I wasn’t looking for eyes or fins at that point – I was calculating the odds of a ball sinking in this river and getting hooked by me.  And then I saw fins and eyes, and it dawned on me – it was a puffed-up pufferfish!  Almost two-thousand river miles from the ocean... 

A fahaka pufferfish on a different day

***

Mister fish biologist with a degree in marine biology didn’t know that about two dozen puffer species around the world live entirely in fresh water.  I must have been absent on pufferfish day in fisheries class...

Now I know that this was a fahaka pufferfish (Tetraodon lineatus).  I at least knew enough to be aware that you shouldn’t eat puffers, no matter where they come from.  And that’s why I hadn’t seen them in the markets. 

But that doesn’t mean you can’t play with them, right? 

It had typical pufferfish teeth that could take out a chunk of my flesh like a cookie-cutter, so I handled it carefully.  I dug a pool in the sand next to the river deep enough for the fish to submerge in. But the puffer had expelled all of its water and had re-filled itself with air.  Now it really was like a toy ball.  It just floated there on the surface up-side-down. 

But after a few seconds, it un-puffed itself and sank into the pool.  It just sat there on the bottom, right-side-up and waving its pectoral fins.  So I poked it (gently) until it filled up with water again.  Coolest thing ever...  But I let it go pretty quick because I had some more fishing to do. 

Then on the second cast I hooked up with a tigerfish.  Don’t get too excited yet – it was about as big as a magic marker pen.  I had seen tigerfish in the market, but this was my first live one in hand.  I’m not sure whether I’d rather be bitten by a pufferfish or a tigerfish.  But tigerfish dentition definitely looks more terrifying than the beak-like teeth of a puffer.

The remarkable thing about a tigerfish mouth, besides the teeth, is that the upper jaw is hinged.  So they can open their mouth very wide and snap it like a bear trap.  Their upper and lower teeth interlace when they bite, so they can take clean chunks from other fish that are too big to swallow whole.  So I carefully played with this guy a little too before letting it go. 

That would be the last edible fish I let go in Mali...

Tigerfish skull showing hinged upper jaw

***

But back to the beginning...

The big beautiful upper Niger River is full of amazing fish. Where we were going to be living was a wide meandering sand-bed river. And there are no dams large enough to impact downstream flows in the watershed above this location.  So the river behaves naturally.  Its floodplain is alive and well.  There are