Northern Pike

Catching, cooking, and dissecting Northern Pike (Esox lucius)

Lafe Conner

Two northern pike caught at Hobble Creek near Provo Bay, October 2018

Catching Pike at Hobble Creek, October 2015

The northern pike is an ancient fish, large-mouthed and many-toothed. It swam in great inland seas with dinosaurs and spread to lakes and rivers across North America, Europe, and Asia before the continents separated and the Atlantic Ocean grew between them. The pike's snout has the distinct shape of a duck bill and the inside contains parallel rows of sharp teeth angled backwards and semi flexible, allowing prey to slip in but holding them fast once inside. Their mouth and teeth allow pike to capture and swallow large fish, making them successful and formidable predators for the past tens of millions of years.

Looking at the teeth lining the top of a pike's mouth, October 2018

As a child I always loved fishing. I have great memories of fishing with my Grandpa and my uncles. They took me fishing at least once a year from the time I was old enough to hold a pole. My first memory of catching a fish I can recall easily because of an old photograph of me standing next to my mother, holding a pole with two tiny hands and with a large farm-raised rainbow flailing at the other end. I have other memories of fishing with Grandpa for brook trout and Yellowstone cutthroat, for catfish and rainbows, and for the blacksmith perch and kelp bass that hang around in the kelp forests off Catalina Island. But of all the sport fish, for me, the greatest prize has long been the northern pike.

Catching northern pike ranks right up there with Alaskan salmon on my list of wishful fishing expeditions, and those dreams of pike fishing began when, as a 12 or 13-year-old boy, I woke up early Saturday mornings to watch fishing shows on ESPN while most other kids my age were catching up on early morning cartoons or still dreaming in their beds. The northern pike, in my mind, took on monstrous and almost supernatural proportions. Many times I have imagined myself reaching into the cool dark water and lifting a pike by the gills taking it by the tail and holding it up for a triumphant photograph. This angler's obsession with pike and my love for wild nature, has given me some mixed feelings about the recent, illegal introduction of pike into Utah Lake.

Back in 2015, my friend Riley from graduate school was working for the Division of Natural Resources (DNR) in Utah County. He agreed to take my Ecology Class from UVU for a field trip to the Hobble Creek wildlife management area to seine for fish. A seine is a net about 4 feet high and 30 to 60 feet long with a wooden poles attached to each end. Two people drag the net through the water, encircling the fish as they approach the shore. A couple of my students dragged the seine through a small backwater pond that had been dug out next to the river channel during the Hobble Creek restoration project. In the net, my students trapped nine enormous carp, one white bass, about 50 black bullhead catfish, and one small northern pike.

Seining for fish with Riley, June 2015, Hobble Creek Restoration Site

Northern Pike we caught in lower Hobble Creek 2015

The first northern pike I took from the wild was kind of disappointing. This almost-nine-inch long outlaw was hardly big enough to put up a fight. The fish confirmed reports of northern pike in the lake, and Riley gave it to a lab at Utah State University for gut content analysis. The big question for DNR biologist is whether these toothy predators are feeding on the endemic June suckers which remain endangered after significant efforts to help them recover. 

Northern pike evolved into a powerful predator in the cold circumpolar rivers and lakes of Alaska, Canada, Minnesota, Maine, Scandinavia, Mongolia, and Siberia. Pike belong to the genus Esox, which includes a handful of recognized species. The northern pike (Esox lucius), though not the biggest, has the widest distribution and is the only one found across Europe, Asia, and North America. The Amur pike (Esox reichertii) resides in the Amur river, which separates Mongolia, China, and Russia near the Sea of Japan. The southern pike (Esox cisalpinus) can be found in the Alps of central and northern Italy. The Aquitanian pike (Esox aquitanicus) was discovered only 4 years ago in the rivers of southwestern France. Three species of pickerels, reaching adult sizes between 1 and 2 feet, are found in the eastern United States from Texas to Maine in rivers along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. The largest of the Esox is the Muskellunge (Esox masquinongy). Muskie, as they are know to anglers, can be found in large lakes and rivers as far west as Minnesota and as far south as Georgia. Hybrids of northern pike and muskellunge, called tiger muskies, are an angler's dream. They're known for being bigger, stronger, and more eager to attack lures than either of their parent species (Doss 2017).

Because pike are exciting to catch and delicious to eat, they have been introduced many times across the United States. The USGS has compiled a list of hydrological units (lakes, rivers, and reservoirs) where pike have been found outside of their native range (Fuller and Nielson 2018). That list encompasses 40 states, including Utah, Nevada, Colorado, California, and Arizona. The first reported catches of northern pike in Utah were in 1982, in the Green River near the Colorado state line and in the southern part of Lake Powell. There are now six rivers and lakes in Utah that contain established populations of pike. During the 1990s, pike from Lake Powell moved up the Colorado river as far east and north as Canyonlands and Arches. Also during the the 90s, pike established in Sevier Bridge Reservoir, Yuba Reservoir, and Redmond Lake. Then, by 2015, anglers began catching pike in Utah Lake.

A second attempt to catch pike at Hobble Creek, October 2018

This past Halloween, my biology class from American Preparatory Academy in Salem made a field trip with Dale, the June sucker biologist from the DNR in Springville. He took our class out for a field trip, and like we had done with Riley in 2015, we took the seine and waded through the ponds along Hobble Creek, just where the stream enters into Provo Bay.

Aerial View of Hobble Creek Wildlife Management Area taken from Google Maps

On that cold Halloween morning, we met Dale at the parking lot and walked the quarter-mile from the frontage road to the end of the restoration site. There, we reached the point that phragmites grew so thick and tall we had to wade into the river or follow narrow trails made by duck hunters and their dogs through the maze of grass stalks towering over our heads. Like we had done in 2015, a couple of students put on chest waders and joined the fish biologist in netting fish from a small backwater pond. I expected they would come back with a net full of carp and catfish, like we had three years before. Instead, we caught only three fish: one carp as big as the palm of my hand and two mid-sized northern pike. 

Bull rush and cattails with phragmites background, Hobble Creek, October 2018

Student holding two pike caught at Hobble Creek, October 2018

Pike are under a must-kill order in Utah Lake, meaning it would be illegal to put these fish back in the water alive. The fish were killed immediately and then brought over for the class to hold and look at. One of my students became particularly fond of holding the fish and carried them around for several minutes making sure everyone had a good look at their scales and teeth. Dale and I talked about what to do with the fish, whether to send them to the lab at Utah State with the others or to take them for our class to examine in more detail. In the end, we decided to take all three fish with us back to the school.

Examining northern pike in the classroom, Salem, October 2018

Dissecting and cooking pike at home and at school

Back at the school, I carefully washed the fish and packed them in ice. I was impressed by their length and the awkward weight of their heads. Though these weren't big fish, by pike standards, they were the largest pike I had ever held or personally handled. I wanted my students to connect with Utah Lake as an ecosystem through these fish - by catching them in the wild, holding them in their hands, examining their features and adaptations, and even by consuming their flesh. 

I often picture a food web in my mind that leads up to the meals we eat. Tracing each ingredient back to the soil or to the air, water, and sunlight from which it came. I wanted me and my students to be able to place ourselves in the web of organisms surrounding the places we inhabit. So, in the evening after school let out, I took the two pikes home and carefully filleted them on my kitchen counter. Each pike contains 5 boneless fillets. The two fillets on the back side of the tail are the thickest, and each one was as thick and as long as my hand, though more narrow. From the back of the pike above the spine, there is a fillet that is long and slender, about two or three times the length of my palm. This fillet from the back is not as thick as the fillets from the flank of the fish. The other two fillets are removed from the sides of the fish between the pectoral fins and the point where the dorsal fin begins on the fish's back. These fillets are almost equal in length to the fillet from the back, but they are thick on one side and become thinner the closer they get to the belly of the fish. 

While filleting a fish, I like to place the fillets in a large bowl filled with water, this helps to keep them clean. After rinsing the meat, I placed the five fillets from each fish into a ziplock bag, and carefully sealing the bag, I placed it back on the ice. We would marinate the meat in lemon-pepper marinade for 30 minutes just before grilling the fish on an electric skillet.  

The students wanted to dissect the fish in class, but I've always been a bit squeamish about dissection. I've been vegetarian since I was 16, more than 21 years now. Although, in the last 10 years I have taken up fishing again along with the practice of eating fish that I catch and kill myself. What makes me uncomfortable about most dissections, is that students have very little connection to the actual living organism. In my experience, dissections often involve an organism that is taken from a box or a bag and we have no idea where it came from, where it was raised, how it lived its life, and the part it played in an ecosystem. For my students, I wanted dissections to be different, to increase their appreciation for the life of the organism and their understanding of its role in the ecosystem and how it evolved special adaptations to perform that role. 

The first time I led my students in a dissection was in the spring of 2016, I had caught three white bass from the Provo River and brought them to class. We filleted the fish and cooked them, the students took the filleted carcasses and examined them and made sketches of the organs and their location. We took one of the heads and cleaved it open from the inside, exposing the brain and the optic and olfactory nerves. I was struck by the single-mindedness of the fish's brain. Almost the entirety of a fish's brain is consumed in the optic and olfactory nerves and the brainstem. The fish's brain functions to keep its heart beating, its gills pumping, and to see, smell, and respond to its environment. I thought that dissection of the bass went well, but in the two years following I had not done another one. 

One of things I didn't like about a class dissection is that students wanted to stab things into the fish, into its eyes and its mouth, not for the purpose of exploring and learning about how the fish lives, but out of a morbid curiosity of what it feels like to poke out a fish's eye. I wanted my students to see each part of the fish but without the violence. In hindsight, I see that my desire and my expectation might have been a little naive. Death is violent in nature, in the kitchen, and in the classroom, and maybe more than hiding that violence from my students, perhaps I should be trying to find a way that they and I can approach it with more humility, reverence, respect, and gratitude. That is what I hope for moving forward. 

To remove the violence from the dissection of these pike, I carefully and respectfully removed each part of the fish. Beginning with the fillets of the muscle and skin, I next sliced open the belly, I found that one of our fish was a female and the other was male. The female was filled with pale yellow eggs contained in two transparent membranes, one along each side of the inner cavity of the fish, attached to the place nearest the spine. Using my fingers and a little force I separated the egg sacks, still intact,  from the fish's body. I placed them into a ziplock bag. Next, I removed the liver, stomach, and intestines, and placed those into a separate bag. I removed the head including the gills and pectoral fins where the heart resided. These went into a third bag. I placed the filleted and gutted carcass in the skillet and let them fry. Later, I would remove the flesh, exposing the spine and ribs and the bones of the fins and tail. 

Filleted pike in my kitchen, Provo, October 2018

The male was handled in much the same way. Though I cut into his abdomen differently so as to expose the heart and I removed the gills from the head, placing them in their own bag to be viewed under the dissecting microscope. The male gonads were filled with the white milt. If these fish had lived to spawn in February, they would have scattered their eggs and milt in the shallow waters of Hobble Creek or Provo Bay. Their offspring would have a head start on the young of the June suckers and the bass, which wouldn't spawn until May. 

Back at school, with the fish dissected into their bags and the marinated fillets cooking on the skillet. My students responded with a variety of marvel and revulsion, curiosity and distance. Some students spent a lot of time gazing through the binocular lenses of our dissection microscopes, examining the parallel lines of pink tissue infused with bright red capillaries where oxygen in the water exchanges with carbon dioxide in the blood as each flowed through the fish's moving gills. Other students took an interest in the eggs, others in the liver, stomach, and intestines. 

We cooked the fish fillets and shared them around the class. We took a plate of fish to the operations manager and the bus driver who had helped to arrange and transport us on the field trip. What was left after class was devoured by scavenging students from other classes who had been attacked by the fresh and savory smell of fish and lemon. I ate none of the fillets. My family and I had eaten the meat from the female that I had fried in the pan at home. We mixed it with lentils and couscous, with a little teriyaki and lemon. 

After school ended, we weighed the egg sacks (38.7 g) and took a pair of dissection scissors and them open, spilling the eggs out onto a petri dish. Spreading out the eggs into piles of 20, we counted the eggs in 1 gram. There were at least 400 eggs in 1 g, meaning at least 15,000 eggs in this fish. This would be her first year to spawn, and she might live 7 to 10 years, and would produce more eggs as she grew adding hundreds of thousand of eggs to Utah Lake during her lifetime (Moeller 2010). I don't have a good sense of the survival rate of pike in Utah Lake from egg to adult, but the potential for population growth is exponential. A predator that is so large, and so prolific could be devastating for the survival of the last endemic fish in the lake. 

Counting the eggs of northern pike, Salem, October 2018

For the sake of the June sucker, I don't want pike in Utah Lake. But, the angler in me is happy to have encountered them. The pike have connected me and my students intellectually and viscerally to the Utah Lake ecosystem. These pike are living things, and I resect them as I respect all life. They pose a continuing threat to the survival of a species of fish that evolved uniquely in Utah Lake and no where else on earth, a species likely to become extinct without continuing direct and effective intervention from biologists and anglers working together. So, in spare moments, I'm nurturing the desire to catch more of the pike from Utah Lake, and I'm hoping to become proficient at taking them with a rod and reel, just as I dreamed of years ago when I was a child.          

Sources

Doss, Sasha S. January 2017. The 7 wonderful pikes, pickerels, and muskies of the world! Patrick Cooney (ed.) The Fisheries Blog. https://thefisheriesblog.com/2017/01/30/esox-pikes-pickerels-and-muskies/. 

Fuller, Pam and Matt Neilson. 2018. Esox lucius Linnaeus, 1758: U.S. Geological Survey, Nonindigenous Aquatic Species Database, Gainesville, FL, https://nas.er.usgs.gov/queries/factsheet.aspx?SpeciesID=676, revised 22 July 2015, peer reviewed 1 April 2016, accessed 3 November 2018.

Moeller, Scott. 2010. Life of a Pike. Young Naturalists. Minnesota Conservation Volunteers. https://files.dnr.state.mn.us/mcvmagazine/young_naturalists/young-naturalists-article/pike_life/pike_life.pdf.

Wilson, Mark V. H., Donald B. Brinkman, and Andrew G. Newman. 1992. Cretaceous Esocoidei (Teleostei): Early Radiation of the Pikes in North American Fresh Waters. Journal of Paleontology 66: 839-846. JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1306019.