Fish
Pike
Esocidae · also called jackfish, luce
A pike does its hunting by not moving. It hangs among the weeds, barred and blotched to match them, easing forward on tiny fin movements until a smaller fish drifts within a body length — and then the whole thing is over in a fraction of a second, one of the fastest accelerations in the fish world, ending with the prey held sideways in a mouth full of backward-pointing teeth.
Overview
Pike are the family Esocidae, around 10 species, in the cool fresh waters of the Northern Hemisphere. All are long, cylindrical ambush predators with a duck-bill snout, and all eat mainly other fish. The circumpolar northern pike is the familiar species; the North American muskellunge is the giant at up to 1.8 m; the pickerels are the small members.
The strike
A pike’s dorsal and anal fins are set far back, near the tail, putting a large paddle right behind the body’s centre — so a single flick fires it forward in a burst it cannot sustain. If the first strike misses, it returns to ambush rather than chasing. The jaws carry front fangs and a roof of small recurved teeth that all point down the throat, so gripped prey can only go one way.
Spawning
Females grow larger and longer-lived, and in early spring — often while ice is still on the lake — they move into flooded margins with several smaller males and scatter sticky eggs over vegetation, with no further care.
A top predator
By preying heavily on smaller fish, pike shape the whole community, and where introduced outside their range — parts of the western US especially — they can wipe out trout, salmon smolts, and native minnows and are extremely hard to remove.
Status
Pike as a family are Not Evaluated. The northern pike is widespread and secure, but the muskellunge depends on stocking in much of its range, and the Aquitanian and southern pike of Europe are threatened by habitat loss and hybridisation with introduced northern pike.
Pike: common questions
How fast can a pike strike?
Very fast over a very short distance. A pike is a lunge predator, not a pursuit predator, and its whole body is arranged to convert a stored coil of muscle into one explosive forward burst. Measurements put the acceleration among the highest recorded for any fish, taking the pike from a standstill to strike speed in a fraction of a second, so that from the prey fish's point of view the pike simply appears. What a pike cannot do is keep that speed up, so if the first strike misses it usually returns to ambush rather than giving chase. This is why anglers fishing lures for pike often get a hard hit within a metre or two of cover.
Are pike dangerous to swimmers?
Not really. Pike are large, toothy, and aggressive toward prey-sized targets, and there are occasional reports of a pike nipping a swimmer's hand, foot, or toe, usually mistaking a pale moving extremity for a fish, particularly in warm shallow water in summer. These bites can cut the skin because of the teeth but are minor, and there is no record of a pike posing a serious threat to a person. The main practical caution is when unhooking a caught pike, since a thrashing fish with hundreds of sharp backward-pointing teeth can inflict a nasty cut, so anglers use long forceps and a firm grip under the gill cover.
What is the difference between a pike and a muskellunge?
They are close relatives in the same genus, and a muskellunge is essentially a larger, paler, more temperate-restricted version of the northern pike. The northern pike is circumpolar, common, has light bean-shaped spots on a darker body, and fully scaled cheeks and gill covers. The muskellunge is found only in eastern North America, grows larger, up to about 1.8 metres, has dark bars or spots on a lighter body or is nearly plain, and has scales only on the upper half of the cheeks and gill covers. Where their ranges overlap they can hybridise, producing the tiger muskellunge, which is usually sterile and popular with anglers.
Why are pike a problem when introduced outside their native range?
Because they are efficient predators of fish that have not evolved alongside them. When northern pike are stocked or illegally introduced into waters outside their natural range, for example parts of the western United States, they can rapidly reduce or wipe out populations of trout, salmon smolts, and native minnows, undermining fisheries worth millions and threatening protected species. Pike breed readily, tolerate a wide range of conditions, and once established are extremely hard to remove from a lake or river system. Several jurisdictions treat illegally introduced pike as a serious invasive threat and spend heavily on control.