Inside a whitefish

[MichaelAngelo]

This post is mainly for Eli because he had asked me to discover the stomach contents of my late catches.

I opened up two whitefish I had caught two weeks ago in a northern lake quite a ways away. Their stomach contents were quite surprising. What was most surprising is that the two fish had completely different stomach contents even though they were in the same group and were caught back-to-back.

Here are their stomach and intestines laid out on the cutting board. Both fish were female. The top fish was the "fatter" of the two even though both of them were the same length. On the left of the picture are the stomach contents for each fish and on the right are the intestinal contents.



Here are the stomach contents of the "fatter" fish. They appear to be some kind of moss or aquatic plant.




Intestinal contents:



Here are the stomach contents of the other fish. They appear to be some kind of dried berry. Perhaps someone's chum? I have no answer for this nor do I have an answer for why two fish in same school would have completely different stomach contents.




Also note the lacerations in the stomach lining. Whatever these things are, it appears they caused some damage to the stomach.

Intestinal contents:



After all those gross pictures, here's the yummy part of both fish