Having just landed a fish on my local water, I was shocked to see it bleeding profusely from it's left gill cover. I had an image in my mind that somehow the line had entered the gill & severed gill filaments!!!

I have caught quite a number of fish from this lake & this is the first time I've seen it, in fact it's the first time Ive seen it full stop & there's been a lot of Carp under the bridge since I started Carping.

Thing is, a regular I was fishing with at the time said ' don't worry a lot of them do that it'll stop soon' .. lo & behold it did & I returned it with no apparent problems.

Anybody else had this experience or have any information whether there's been any real damage done?

A friend and I netted some koi out of one pond to move to his new pond a wial back. one of the 1st fish that was netted bleed badly from the gills and all the vains on its flanks stood up. we put the koi back into the same pond and tried it again an hour later this time it seamed to be fine.
we put each koi in a big polly bag with water to move it the mile to the new pond but when looking closer at the water all the bags had a red tinge of blood in them.

after taking to a few people it was put down to stress from being caught and the bleeding soon stopped.
one fish was belly up when we got back to the new pond but my mate stayed up with it most of the night swimming around the pond, even this fish is fine and doing well now.

Look back in the archieve's on this site, a couple of interesting threads on this subject

Humans get a nose bleed when stressed..maybe fish bleed when stressed as well..but I have never come across this.

Thanks Stez & active 8,

Having had a look through some archived posts on the subject it would appear that this is not unusual!!

Stress seems to be generally agreed on to be the most likely cause coupled with high temps & low oxygen levels.

These were the conditions when it happened, plus I have a feeling they had'nt long spawned.

Nice to know nobody appears to have any experience of permanent damage. Mind, the puzzle is how the hell have I got through 20yrs of Carp fishing & never come across this.

Peter.

when i was fishing at the carp school at horseshoe i had a 19lbs mirror, this fish appeared to be bleeding from the gills, but when we looked closer there were skins, it turns out the fish was full of blood worm, you could actually see some of the whole bloodworm,,,,so it wasnt bleeding at all....maybe this was the problem you experienced...
regurgatating bloodworm!!!



Baz

er..are you not taking 'bloodworm' a bit too literally here?

over my head mate !!! How d you mean?

Jason, blood worms are bright red from oxygen holding hemoglobin in their blood. Squeeze them and you'll see. Squashed blood worm debrie on the gill rakers? Well I've seen stranger things so I'll buy the theory.

Cannon spodder, Interesting thought mate but the blood was literally running through the landing net & on to the ground when we lifted her out.

It congealed very quickly & stopped, though not till after it had frightened the living daylights out of me I really thought we had a dead Carp on our hands.

The pond concerned is quite difficult as well so every Carp is a prize!!