Bloody brilliant report!
My juices are flowing..eerr so to speak.
Having a large body mass is of no advantage as far as heat retention goes for an animal that is cold blooded.
I agree completely with the crayfish theory. When cray hunting in the shallows, I've often had snapper of the size that are normally extremely wary swim up to me bold as brass (and got a spear through them for their trouble). They seem unable to resist the chance of a feed of cray. Would make awesome bait.
Big rays also chase the soft crays in the shallows. It's quite something to watch them select a cave, seal it up with their undersides and then 'vacuum' the crays out by drawing water through their mouths and ejecting it out the spiracles on the tops of their heads. They must have a lot of grunt as the water that comes out of them is all stirred up with sediment and it dos'nt take long before the whole ray disapears in a cloud
Long John - quite the most intelligent thing I have ever heard from you- but admittedly you did not have much to beat.
I speared a 5.5kg and 6.5kg snapper from a big herd of snapper that were after soft shell crays at Little Barrier once. They did incredibly stupid unsnapper like behaviour and would literally get in the cray hole with you when you found and were struggling with a cray.
Does not happen often though so enjoy it when it does.
Russ
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