Newly hatched pike fry start eating daphnia and other plankton sized morsels, but they quickly learn the tough rules of the water world: eat or be eaten.

In spring literarily thousands of small pike fry cruise the shallows looking for food. Very often the easiest available food source for the small pike are their own siblings. And that’s how it starts. One of the small pike eats another, and soon it is growing faster and moving up in the food chain. That plan works great… until it meets an even larger pike :0)

Lot’s of years ago I was asked to make some photos for a science report on pike fry and cannibalism. I set up a large fish tank with maybe a 100 small hatchery pike. A few weeks later only a very few pike were still in the tank – and each and everyone of these were planning on killing the others.

Here are a couple of pictures from that project.