You know about -and maybe have seen- birds swoop down and catch fish out of the water. Happens all the time. This is completely different. The African freshwater tigerfish turns the tables and jumps right out of the water and catches a bird to eat -and it's caught on video for the first time! Nico Smit, director of Environmental Sciences at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa, reported the experience to the Journal of Fish Biology.
Rumours of such behaviour by the African tigerfish (Hydrocynus vittatus), which has been reported as reaching one metre in length, have circulated since the 1940s. But Smit says that his team was “never really convinced by the anecdotal reports”. So, when they set out to study of the migration and habitat use of these animals in a South African lake in the Mapungubwe National Park, near the border with Botswana and Zimbabwe, they were not necessarily looking for fish flying out of the water.
Although only one catch was caught on film, the team saw about twenty such strikes by the fish. -via Time Newsfeed