Brian Dare talks nesting Murray Cod

And this yellowbellys in underneath the log, and we had a shrimp come up and he wasn’t even interested. Now if I was a fish and it was jumping up in front of me a foot away, I’d be having a go at it. 

Gav sort of panned around to the left, now I get the feeling this fellas come out and  he’s pretty aggressive and he’s had a go at this fish and hunted him because he was hanging around the site.

With the river system and finding the little cod down there in the nesting site, I was lucky enough to see Gav and Steve going down the river with the camera lens and all of a sudden the little fish came out from his hidey-hole, his nesting site and hit the camera lens. Steve had never had this happen to him before, Gav was lucky enough to have that happen to him down on the Clarence and all of a sudden, sitting over in the canoe from them seeing these two blokes go ‘high fives’ that they’d found this site, it was great. Terrific!

So we were watching what was happening down there. We saw the male and the female go in, saw the shimmying and the shaking and we all went home and had a cold shower and came back three days later and filmed the egg-site and here’s Carl (the cod) looking after it. 

And it’s his job for the next 25 to 28 days to look after that site. During that period he’s got to be pretty well fit because he doesn’t leave that site, he doesn’t feed during that period. What he’s doing is maintaining it, running over the eggs, making sure that those that hadn’t fertilised do get taken away from the site, because they do form a fungi and that affects the other fish eggs that are fertilised. So that’s his job in maintaining it. 

And he uses his fins to actually, very supersensitive, he must be 118% switched on, because you can just see the fins just touching the egg yolks and the eggs and cleaning  anything that’s away from it and he’s doing that constantly, I mean 24 hours a day, its full on, he’s pretty keen.

We went back down and filmed the site and we were lucky enough to pick up a couple of little black dots on a couple of the eggs where they had hatched. 

You could still see these little fish madly ducking around all over the place and I mean, they’re 2mm cod and you’ve got these things that are you know, 25mm and 30mm long attacking this egg site and you’re thinking “oh no, here we go. This is where the loss is”. You could actually see where some of it has been cleaned up.

Yeah it’s been good doing it, but a whole lot more needs to be done. A heck of a lot of scientific work to be done yet, but it’s a start.

I have a passion for the cod – always have.