Do Not Mess With Fish 278,

and you thought fish were fun!

photographs and article Dan Tri, well this certainly looks like fun! it all started with a handful of duck pellets, 

 Muoi Phuc, a Vietnamese duck farmer who lives in Long Kien, in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, changed his life on Tết (Vietnamese New Lunar Year) of 2020, as he prepared some rice, he looked out the window and noticed a few fish coming out to the surface of the river, Muoi Phuc took a handful of duck food pellets he had lying around and threw them to the fish, the next day the fish were back, and again he threw them some food, you can guess the rest, not only did the fish come back, they brought a load of their mates with them! The majority of fish in question are pangasius catfish,

at first, Muoi Phuc used a few bags of fish food every month, but now, the school of fish has gotten so big that he needs tons of food per month to keep them fed, sometimes the cost is too much for him, so he throws them spoiled fruit and vegetables donated by local farmers, which the fish seem to like just as much, if the name pangasius catfish seems familiar it is because the sale of the fish has often lead to a number of prosecutions in the UK, for instance in this article in 2009, and this one in 2017, and there have been many more cases of pangasius being sold off as cod or haddock, as it happens this is a good read about what we really are eating, back to Vietnam, there is a link to a video of Muoi Phuc feeding the fish here, the good news is that tourists routinely come to Muoi Phuc’s home to see the giant school of fish for themselves, but there is a down side, every night, dozens of fishing boats stop by his house and throw their nets in hopes of catching the giant school but so far the fish have been able to avoid them, Muoi and his father often stay up to make sure no one harms the fish, “Many people know that there are fish here, so they take advantage of our absence to stalk and cast their nets,” Muoi told Dantri. Every time we see them fish her, my father and I beg them not to do it. I don’t know what else to do.” hopefully the fish will keep away from the nets and keep the family and tourists happy,

as an aside way back in November 2015 Diana and myself visited a pangasius fish farm when we were in Vietnam,

they were bred and raised on a commercial scale, in our post I asked how many in this pontoon? the trick to counting them is to speed count, you count the eyes and divide by 2, and the answer is? 120,000 fish in this one pontoon, the fish are sold when they reach 1 to 1.5 kilos, the fish will grow up to nearly 45 kilos, but after 1.5 kilos the fat content in the fish goes up too much, so it is then the fish are readied for the International and local markets, the brood stock fish are spawned 3 times a year, so there is a steady production of filleted fish, in case you are wondering about the size of the export market in Vietnam for pangasius catfish for the table, in July 2022, Vietnam exported around 186 million U.S. dollars worth of pangasius, yes, 186 million U.S. dollars worth, and that is just one month! it is a huge business.