Can. Scientists Discover Gigantic Freshwater Cod - Can Swallow Loons Whole

[hatrack]

"The biggest cod left on the planet, creatures so large and hungry they have been known to swallow loons whole, are thriving in a remote saltwater lake researchers call a "living laboratory" in the Canadian Arctic.

Scientists studying the huge cod -- which can measure more than a metre in length and weigh as much as 26 kilograms, many times the size of cod now found in the sea -- say the fish are cannibals with voracious appetites that eat almost anything that crosses their path, including prickly sea urchins, each other, and in at least one case, an entire loon.

"We opened the stomach of one of these fish and it had a bird in it, a loon," says Dalhousie University biologist Jeff Hutchings, who heads the team studying and marvelling over the cod lurking in Ogac Lake on Baffin Island. "Whether it was a common loon or a red-throated loon we're not sure, but it was clearly a loon," says Hutchings. "The cod swallowed it whole. There was this 19-centimetre neck and some feathers and skull bones in its stomach."

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Natives have long known about the cod fish of Ogac Lake. (Ogac is Inuit for cod.) So have scientists, who have visited the remote location a few times since the 1950s to study the lake and its only resident fish. Hutchings and his colleague Dave Hardie first trekked to Ogac Lake last summer, and will return this year with native guides who, among other tasks, help keep the area's polar bears at bay. The lake provides researchers with a rare chance to study a self-sustaining cod population that has not been decimated by over-fishing -- at least not yet. Hardie is concerned sports fishers could easily wipe out the cod, which he says are so hungry they almost swim onto hooks."

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[aquart]

1. Cod is a tasty fish. With chips.

[Sinistrous]

2. Do you think they could propagate in the Potomac River?

There are a lot of loons along the banks down there.