small mouth lips

[dollar]

joh, you guys have witness something amazing that i have never seen except for the usual behaviour. except for recent times fishing dirty water never revealed such activity. last weekend i spent the whole day fishing the same glide just behind the last rapid (upstream) on the opposite bank of silver streams.in that spot the water varied in depth from knee to ankle deep with good viz and had plenty of yellows about. because of the good water clarity one could easily see what they were up to, holding position, jockeying for position and sometimes you could see their flanks shimmering but never did i see any stone flipping or and any water disturbance on the water surface signalling stone pushing in the shallow water (here I am guessing the fish needs to exert some force with their tails to dig their noses under the stone to flip) . yellows from that area don’t have much rubber lips like those further downstream towards the potch area, evident that stone pushing/flipping does not suit silver streams or the stretch of river below the barrage. hoping soon to visit elgro and will keep an eye out for this interesting fact.
while writing the above, my thinking was, shouldn't their noses be affect with stone flipping rather than with their lips. if not this tells me they suck or cause a vacuum with their mouths to be able to flip the stones, they do have under-swung mouth parts and with inflated lips for grip, maybe easier to hold onto the smooth stone. once the stone is overturned there is no need for brut force in taking in the food off the stone and the need for inflated lips. another thing to talk about is crabs, crabs put a fight and could hurt the lips making them inflated. bass fishing has provided me with this info when bassing

[Korrie]

Another factor to remember, once the rock have moved a little, there is a water cushion, that makes moving the rock easier.
as for crabs putting up a fight, only the really big ones, the other gets sucked in so quickly, before the crab knows what is happening, it is in very dark deep black cramped space. On a trip drifting the Breede, I saw how a SM Bass regurgutated 5 or 7 crabs, trying to get rid of a fly it had swallowed in the rapids.
The old folks, I am talking about my grand father's generation, they believed the best way to catch the "Stroom geelvis" as the SM was called was with a single crab on a hook, with a sliding ball sinker tossed into the fast flowing water. (The Large Mouth was called the Kalwer Kop. Have a look at the head from the front top of a LM, it looks liike a small calf's head) Look at Gerrit's photos, there is one or 2 where this is visible.

[dollar]

after my last post i landed at the fish monger. after a couple of beers i was telling the wife about the tuff time on site due to the recent rains and came across the word "callus" and joked about it's spelling. "kallis" for sport (its pronunciation "cull alles" for obvious reasons hehehe) and "calluses" for the hard formed skin on ones hands thru hard labour. it hit me, rubber lips developed from hard labour. not one rubber lip caught in the pass showed any cuts or sores, any battle scars or infection. as Korrie mentioned that crabs were unlikely the culprit of fat lips as I had thought and in the interim i cancelled out freshwater mussels (was going to mention them and ruled it out as they similar properties to crabs). Then contemplating the fact that stones could easily be turned by the help of moving water causing suction, vortex or up lift and yellows naturally a strong river fish. the known fact of fish (body shape) looking identical, I have come to terms that rubber lips and thin lips are of the same species. Its ability to change its lips is amazing to me, let it be because of result of hard labour or a pre-requisite tool for foraging is a beautiful thing. Personally I prefer pics with rubber lips, for some reason they look a lot more mean than them sporting their thin lips.
Some research done today on the net
http://www.tomsutcliffe.co.za/fly-fi...tvn-nymph.html here is of 3kg stones being moved.
Thanks for the help :smile:

[dollar]

sorry JadeDSantos
not the biggest fish but check the beard on this guy
http://www.flytalk.co.za/forum/album...chmentid=15827

[JadeDsantos]

Yip, thats the issue I have with the Orange, lots of smaller fish, but some proper lips on that guy. Here is the interesting thing to me (I havent read the previous comments yet to forgive me) Orange, I catch lots of rubber lips, I cant much less in smaller waters, that includes the vaal. Recently in Lesotho I caught a decent fish with huge rubber lips, he seemed very out of place.

[chrisvd]

The lips on smallies change according to their feeding habits. There were a scientific study done on it, rubber lips can form within 3 years apparently. I will see if I can still get the document somewhere. You can definitely see different shapes on mouths of fish caught on dries vs nymphing in general. Having studied their behavior quite well from bridges etc, it's very obvious how they form rubber lips, it's kind of like "eelte" on your hands from hard work...

[Korrie]

Chris,
as the Sm tend to swim in schools or shoals, I think they learn the feeding behaivour from the larger fish.

[yella]

The rubber lipped ones also regularly have a bump on the nose from rolling over the rocks. I have a few photos showing it quite clearly.